another post after a long time...
There is an important piece of legislation that is doing the rounds in the US congress... It directly affects a slew of big companies in the US, including the telcos like Verizon and the new internet companies like google and yahoo besides Microsoft. This is one point where all the non-telco companies, including Microsoft and Google see eye to eye and are in fact fighting the case together...
Net neutrality is simple terms means, all content on the intranet, irrespective of the nature of content, who generated it, who owns it and who accesses it, should be available on equal terms to every user on the net. Now, you may ask what is so special about that. Well, the telcos, who are investing loads of money in the telecom infrastructure, want to take control of their customers... and how... they want to be able to charge the different companies that generate content on their networks in different ways...
what this means is that, a google which can tomorrow provide a Voice over IP telephone service can be charged differentially (higher) for the bandwidth they use by their service provider, than say other companies, which may not have services that compete with those provided by the service provider...
naturally this seems unfair on the googles and yahoos of the world... the telcos argue that having invested so much money on their infrastructure, they own the right to exploit it to maximise value, that just left the so called "over the top" operators like google ride ove their network and gain the value that the customer generates... so you see, that seems fair enough too...
this is going to be an interesting battle... if you want to know more about the topic, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality
