Written by: James Burke
Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Network Neutrality relates to the principle of a freedom of connection to any other connection in the network with no controlling gatekeeper and no fettering of access - all communication through a network from one connection to another should be done so impartially and without prejudice.

The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said - BBC Tech News

The Internet, and in particular the "web" has developed on the concept of network neutrality, where everyone has the same level of access to the web and that all data moving around the web is treated equally. However, telecoms companies and broadband providers are pushing for a two-tier system where data from companies or institutions that can pay are given priority over those that cannot.

One of the driving forces behind this is the lack of available bandwidth that the telecoms companies have available within their infrastructure and the increasing appetite for creation and consumption of bandwidth hungry data such as video and streaming.

The Internet has facilitated a huge explosion of unregulated speech and content leading to a freedom of connection to any other connection which is the fundamental element of any kind of social networking. Comparisons brought out in the video relating to this "user generated content" for Internet, Television and Newspapers is shown below:

• Internet - 60% created by people not corporations
• Television - 0% created by people not corporations (OK, there may be some community channels...)
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