Net Neutrality: This Week's Hot Debate

Many companies, like Comcast, want to manage traffic into sites. Net Firms and Broadband companies like Comcast can control traffic into websites, so that they can allow high-speed access to some sites, while other sites would suffer slower access speed. Website owners would have to pay Comcast for faster speeds, while the rest of us would just have to suffer with slower speeds.

Net Neutrality, for all of you who don't already know, is the concept that all sites should be allowed to have high-speeds and that companies should not have the right to control that.

In the future, I think that this is going to be a huuuuge issue. The internet is popular for being a completely ungovernable media, with the exception of censorship (like in China, though there are way of getting around that). Now that companies and governments have the technology to monitor and manage internet traffic, the internet is entering a new era of laws and restrictions. And because the internet is global and laws are domestic, countries and the companies within them are going to have a very interesting future figuring out how to deal with all these internet issues.

The Federal Communications Committee held a meeting yesterday to discuss Net Neutrality and the fact that Comcast has "been exposed as managing traffic by stopping some of its 13m customers uploading files to BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks."

A formal investigation is underway to decide whether or not Comcast should be punished for this. The debate is as to whether or not it's wrong. Some people think that allowing net firms to manage traffic is fine, but they must keep their customers fully informed about their practices. However this turns out, this debate sure is an interesting one and it definitely applies to you and me.