The democratic chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet has proposed a bill to promote the idea, known as ''Net neutrality,'' of treating all Internet traffic equally.
The bill was introduced partially in response to Comcast’s practice of interfering with file transfer traffic and AT&T’s announcement that it might start preventing file transfers if it can tell the download contains copyrighted material.
The bill would prevent such interference. It would also prevent ISPs from charging content providers special fees to speed up their traffic or based on bandwidth used or to give priority to certain traffic over other traffic.
Some ISPs have floated the idea of charging some website for “accelerating” their content to the ISPs subscribers. Comcast, for example, could improve the speed of using Yahoo versus Google, charging Yahoo for the benefit.
Another possibility, for example, Time Warner cable could accelerate content that it owns, such as AOL, and slow content from rivals.
Even another possibility, would be ISPs charging content sites based on the amount of content delivered over the ISPs network. Cablevision could send Youtube a bill every month based on how many videos its subscribers downloaded. This would be akin to Cablevision sending a bill to NBC every month based on how many people watched ER.
Any of these tactics would cause tremendous damage to the Internet especially since many people only have one choice of high speed Internet access service providers. Could you imagine buying a TV that wouldn’t get NBC or would diminish the picture quality of CBS? This legislation is needed to prevent your ISP from turning the Internet into a complex quagmire or affiliations and alliances.
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