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There has been a lot of buzz recently around net neutrality and what it means for businesses and consumers. Net neutrality effectively means that content providers and ISPs should work together blindly. For example, an ISP like Verizon should not choose to limit bandwidth to or filter Google websites because it wants to charge Google a fee or because it disagrees with a posting slamming Verizon’s pricing on Google Buzz. Vice-versa, Google should not restrict Verizon consumers from visiting its websites or de-prioritize their requests because Google disagrees with a policy of Verizon.

Why is this important? Well – in either case, it is not just the businesses that are affected, but the consumer. The following are a number of reasons that support net neutrality.

1. Freedom of Speech
2. Economic Growth and Freedom – Access as a bargaining chip could stint growth and cause investors to become more risk-adverse without guarantees for access.
3. Civic Participation
4. Economic Fairness – The potential to charge different rates for different types of access could more negatively affect poorer Communities

Opponents to net neutrality do have a few points. First, they assert that the need for net neutrality is preemptive and assumes that ISPs will selectively filter content. I do not agree with this point. However, their second point is somewhat more understandable, that ISPs need to selectively control bandwidth in order to ensure a high quality of service. In fact, many opponents highlight reductions in bandwidth for P2P transfers.

So what next?

The most interesting development has been a joint paper published by Verizon and Google. Basically, it seems like a decent compromise in that the type of data (content, audio, video) may be filtered or priced differently to ensure the highest quality of service but not sources within the data (google.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, facebook.com). Read the WSJ article here. Opponents to the paper and proponents to strict net neutrality say that it might encourage a tiered / class system on the Internet that could stifle investment and growth.  Personally, I think that that risk is small and more attune to happen if websites were classified in groups. In this case, it would just be the type of content being sent… I would love to be able to check GMail quickly and not wait for the person next to me to finish downloading a movie.