The future of the Internet: Choosing sides on 'net neutrality'

Published: 2006-06-16

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Politics makes for strange bedfellows, and the ongoing debate in Congress over "net neutrality" is just the latest example. The U.S. bishops are for net neutrality. So are the Christian Coalition, the Gun Owners of America and Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, as well as large Internet content providers such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. In the other corner are the Internet service providers -- large telephone and cable companies -- whose lines are used by Internet content providers on one end, and the citizenry represented by such groups as the U.S. bishops, the Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of America on the other end. Net neutrality, short for network neutrality, is the current protocol governing Internet traffic. If an Internet user wants to look at any online site, he or she can access it with roughly the same ease as anything else that's online -- presuming the site's host can smoothly direct whatever traffic comes its way. Current telecommunications law being rewritten in Congress makes no mention of net neutrality as a standard. The Senate Commerce Committee was to vote on a bill June 22; a House version of the bill, which contained no net neutrality enforcement provisions, passed earlier in June.

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