This Week in Tech show #60 (http://twit.tv/60) has some good discussion about net neutrality. The US Senate recently rejected a net neutrality amendment to a telecommunications bill. The need for legislation about net neutrality might be a bit premature but the future of the Internet as we know it is grim without rules against traffic shaping and preferential treatment. It's worth a listen. Here's what I got from it:

Net neutrality naysayers claim that companies like Google and eBay are getting a free ride because they push out so much data into the Internet. But that's hogwash. Google, eBay, and all major content providers are already paying huge sums of money for access to the Internet. I've heard folks speculate that YouTube, for example, is paying more than a $1 million per month just for bandwidth. That's an expensive "free ride."

Why don't the backbone operators simply raise the price of access to their backbones? Because the issue is not the cost, the issue is that the operators want to be able to prioritize traffic. They want to say to Google, "Hey, do you want your stuff to move faster than MSN? Throw some extra change in our pocket and we'll prioritize your traffic." I don't like that idea. It's like an express lane on the highway for rich people.

More precarious is the backbone operator as content provider. If that happens, every content provider that is not a telecom could end up as a second class citizen in terms of delivery. If content from Google, Yahoo, or MSN becomes dramatically slower than content from AT&T or Verizon, what will consumers do? What would you do?

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