About Network Neutrality

By: Jim Church, Collin Burger, Jason Paul, and Yu Sun Jung

What is Net Neutrality?

Why is it important?
Free and Open Internet
Corporate discrimination
Massive growth of WWW

Development of technology and services

Supporters of the Concept

Organizations that support network neutrality

include:
Moveon.org
Consumer Federation of America
AARP
American Library Association
Gun Owners of America
Public Knowledge
the Media Access Project
the Christian Coalition
TechNet

Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web)

has also spoken out in favor of net neutrality.

Opposition to the Concept

The free-market advocacy organizations

FreedomWorks Foundation, National Black Chamber

of Commerce, the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
and the Progress and Freedom Foundation, hightech trade groups (such as the National Association
of Manufacturers), and others oppose network
neutrality.

Associated Legal &

Corporate
Issues
While various pieces of legislation
have been proposed, nothing has
received enough support to be made
law.
Telecom companies like AT&T and
Time Warner have tried various
pricing strategies based on bandwidth
consumption however, none have met
with success, either ending in public
outcry, or a ruling by the FCC.

Differing Perspectives
Some companies which own

the networks want to inhibit

P2P activity, claiming it
slows their whole network
and is primarily used for
illegal purposes.
The most extreme

proposals from such

companies suggest varying
payment plans which
provide limited to complete
access of the internet.

Differing Perspectives
These proposals by companies are often

proposed in a profit seeking capitalist

context.
Proponents of Net Neutrality counter that

they dont expect access to the internet to be

free, but that freedom of conduct and quality
of the internet are integral to preserving the
integrity of the internet.

Differing Perspectives
Could any control at all lead to censorship?

Social Issues with Network

Neutrality
1. End to end principle: the principle that

communications protocol operations should be

defined to occur at the end-points of a
communication system.
2. Data discrimination: a claim that the current

internet is not neutral as its implementation of

best effort generally favors file transfer and
other non-time sensitive traffic over real-time
communications.

Social Issues with Network

Neutrality
3. Quality of service: There is no single, uniform

method of interconnecting network using IP, and

not all networks that use IP are part of the
internet. Thus IPTV networks such as AT&Ts UVerse service are isolated from the Internet, and
are therefore not covered by network neutrality
agreements.
4. Over provisioning.
5. Peer-to-peer file sharing.
6. Pricing models.