Introduction

The Internet has historically been considered an “open and free” medium. Currently, Internet users get access to any Web site on an equal basis. Foreign and domestic sites, big corporate home pages and low-traffic blogs all show up on a user’s screen in the same way when their addresses are typed into a browser. (NY Times 2010) Having its beginnings in military and research facilities in the late 1960’s, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) slowly evolved into what is now known as the Internet in the 1990’s. Since then is has become the backbone of American and world culture and economics. There is almost no limit to the content available today. Any person with an idea and access to the Internet can share …show more content…

Conversely, if prioritization of traffic allows the low-bandwidth browsing through first, only 5 percent of users would experience a delay, and that delay will be negligible when compared with the experience of viewing the video, especially as most software-driven video players buffer many of the packets in the stream anyhow. (Hunter, 2010)

Given the ambiguity about whether mandating network neutrality would promote or impede economic welfare, the more technologically humble course would be for policymakers to embrace a principle of network diversity, which would permit individual network owners to explore alternative business arrangements until concrete harm to competition can be demonstrated. (Yoo, 2006)

According to the FCC, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can't resist engaging in such bad behaviors as slowing a competitor's sites to direct traffic to their own profit centers. Though they cannot cite a single case where federal intervention was needed to avert this behavior, the FCC proposes to take over the very Internet architecture that ISPs invest 60 billion job-creating dollars a year developing. It will insist that no information can be prioritized by the ISPs, transferring that power to federal authorities instead. ISPs are left asking obvious questions. Why invest in making a network more efficient, why