On maintaining equal access

The AP reports that the U.S. telecoms who operate the infrastructure of the Internet are sick of how egalitarian the structure is, and want to start charging for priority service...no matter how inefficient that might be for all concerned:

On the Internet, the traffic cops are blind — they don't look at the data they're directing, and they don't give preferential treatment.

That's something operators of the Internet highway, the major U.S. phone companies, want to change by effectively adding a toll lane: They want to be able to give priority treatment to those who pay to get through faster...

To the opponents, abandoning the "network neutrality" principle opens up the prospect of the carriers blocking sites that don't pay up or that compete with the carriers' own services — for instance, by providing phone calls...

Another objection to packet prioritization is technical.

The Internet2 association assumed that prioritization was the way to go when it started building a super-fast next-generation network connecting universities.

However, engineers abandoned that notion after a few years, concluding that it's more effective simply to expand the network's capacity for all traffic — adding lanes to the highway instead of a parallel toll road.

It may be difficult to blame the telecoms for seeking an extra way to make money. But there should be no doubt about the consequences of a priority structure: in addition to boosting the telecoms, the effect would be to undermine access to all those not willing to pay the premium.

This would be in part due to technology likely developing at the pace of the premium speeds, leaving large numbers of users behind; and in part due to the telecoms' own incentive to reduce the quality of standard service to encourage their customers to pay more. And aside from the new disparity in service, there's also the risk that an Internet built to more closely sort all data would also leave far more opportunity for surveillance of content - which could be particularly problematic if the U.S. Congress wants something back from the telecoms in exchange for the privilege of implementing a tiered system.

It's easy to assume that the Net will always be as efficient a source for the flow of information as it's been to date. But a tiered system could do nothing but undermine the decentralization and democracy that make the current model so effective. And it's in nobody's interest to gamble on the telecoms' word when the potential losses are so high.