Fergie's Tech Blog

Fight Brewing in Congress Over Net Neutrality

Grant Gross writes on InfoWorld:

Someday soon, your broadband provider may allow you to get faster results on one search engine, while your favorite search site is slower.

A handful of large broadband providers control the pipes into most U.S. residents’ homes, and they now want to control the content flowing over those pipes, consumer advocates complain. And how much control large broadband providers such as AT&T, BellSouth and Comcast have over the Web sites and applications customers use on their broadband networks is at the heart of a debate heating up in the U.S. Congress this year.

A concept called net neutrality -- that Internet users should have the right to go to any legal Web site, run any legal Web application and attach any legal device to the network -- has been around for years. Former U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Michael Powell called for four Internet freedoms enveloping net neutrality in February 2004.

posted by Fergie @ 2/21/2006 04:43:00 PM