Net Neutrality Links

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Is Net Neutrality A Myth? [via Light Within]

The advocates of net neutrality have, at first blush, one overwhelming argument in their favor. The Internet was designed to be a dumb network, with all the brains and innovation residing at the ends of the system. As such, all bits of data traveling over the Internet would be treated equally. This “end-to-end” design principle is the essence of network neutrality and, the proponents of mandated net neutrality argue, must be maintained to secure the Internet as we know it.

This essential characteristic, it is argued, precludes the owners of the Internet’s “pipes” from engineering any intelligence into the network’s architecture–and thus any differential pricing–since all the intelligence must reside at the edges. Proponents of mandated net neutrality managed to force the adoption of some net neutrality provisions into the recent merger agreement between AT&T (nyse: T – news – people ) and Bell South.

But in ” The Myth of Network Neutrality and What We Should Do About It,” Robert Hahn and Robert Litan of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies argue that, contrary to the claims of regulated neutrality proponents, “all bits of information are not treated equally from an economic standpoint.” They argue that “the Internet is not end-to-end now and was never designed to be strictly neutral.”

How can this be? The engineering architects of the Internet drafted the technical rules in informal papers called Requests for Comment. The early drafters of the Net’s architecture, according to Hahn and Litan, “recognized the need to offer priority to some packets over others.”

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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