Google is probably the biggest advocate of the net-neutrality cause.  With their “Don’t be evil” mantra, Google has used its mighty power to shame ISPs who want to “shape” their networks.  Their stance is that no one should restrict or filter internet access.

However, as time goes by, it seems that more and more people are accepting the idea of proprietary access.  Slashdot and many others have posted a storyabout how portals like Yahoo can delete user’s content without any question.  The heart of this is the Terms of Service that users agree to when they register for an account.  The ToS states that Yahoo has the authority to do what they want with the data that’s on their servers.  They own them so they should be able to do what they want.

This relates to net-neutrality because ISPs are already filtering out what you can and cannot access.  The biggest perpetrator of this is Comcast, which is blocking most BitTorrent traffic.  Comcast contends that they are not blocking anything, but reports and tests say otherwise.

People SCREAM that they want net-neutrality but does their behavior dispute that opinion?

With the release of hulu.com, many people have hailed it as the next-generation TV station.  NetFlix, Apple iTunes, and Amazon all offer online videos to rent.  YouTube garners so much traffic that many companies block it.  Same goes for MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

The sad thing part is that sooner or later, hulu and the link will unable to sustain themselves with ads alone (read dot-com bubble).  They will eventually want to make it subscription-based.  Heck, most people are willing to pay money to keep from seeing ads!  In order to accomplish this, we will probably have to give up net-neutrality.

Why? If more and more people start going to hulu for television, ISPs will have a lot of traffic going to that one URL.  While it won’t cost them more, they will want to get money from it so why not charge extra for “faster access”?

I support net-neutrality.  But at some point, I have to ask myself what is it that I really want.  To be honest with you, I’d rather have faster hulu.com access than have everything the same speed.  This, of course, assumes that this is how proprietary access would work.

Net-neutrality is important because it gives the little man the same voice as the big corporations.  It gives everyone a fair chance to reach their audience.  Can you imaging typing in http://www.amazon.com and instead being directed to http://www.bn.com?  From there, you’ll be greeted with a window offering you lower prices for the item that your looking for.  If you stillwant to go to amazon.com, you’d have to hit another button to continue.  But then your browsing comes to a crawl.  But then you go back to bn.com, and everything is fine again!

We want net-neutrality, but we may be beating a dead horse.  At the very least, we’re saying one thing and doing something else entirely.

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