silentcorner

On Thursday, the House rejected a net neutrality amendment in it’s passing of the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006.

By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others.

Now, I haven’t been following the Network Neutrality discussions as much as I probably should, nor do I claim to be an expert, but what does this all mean exactly? Well, there currently is no net neutrality government regulation today. From what I’ve read, this is a push to get government regulation in place that would prevent broadband providers (the people who provide high speed internet access to the home), from prioritizing traffic or access based on fees or favoritism to certain content providers (like their own over others, or to those who pay them versus those who don’t, for example).

Now I am a proponent of network neutrality. I don’t want my service provider telling me who I can and cannot connect to, or that this content is more important than that content. But so far, this has been handled through self-regulation of the Internet, and not government intervention, and in general, I prefer it that way, not from any deep seeded anti-government feelings, but in more of a new frontier, govern yourself attitude of we can deal with these issues as users and content providers of the web. Probably a little idealistic, but it’s been working so far.

Lack of network neutrality isn’t really a problem today, it’s a proposed problem of the future. Will it become one as broadband providers get more ingrained into homes in the future? That’s certainly a possibility, and maybe my attitude will change due to it. It’s certainly something to keep an eye on anyway. If this is of interest to you, there’s a wealth of information on Wikipedia to peruse through.