Michael Geist points to a new Canadian website dealing with net neutrality called What is Net Neutrality. Its worth a look for anyone interested in the issue. Since everyone uses the Internet, this issue impacts us all. The issue is also being raised for wireless services.

Network neutrality is essentially about whether ISP’s, or the owners of the pipes, can play with the traffic to prioritize some traffic at the expense of others. That’s not an issue if it improves the quality of the data, so long as it is not at the expense of another. Favouring one’s own VOIP service for example, while degrading 3rd party VOIP.

One of the simplest examples is on a comment to Michael’s post. That comment was credited to Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. I tracked down the Boing Boing post – which attributes it to Craig Newmark of Craiglist.

The actual excerpt from Cory’s post is:

it would be like calling Joe’s Pizza and having the phone company tell you that since Joe hadn’t paid for “guaranteed connections” to you, that you’d have to wait three minutes before they’d put the call though (but you can talk to a Domino’s operator right now if you’d like!).

For earlier comments of mine on net neutrality, click on it in my tag cloud.

Read Michael’s post

Go to the What is Net Neutrality site

Read Cory’s post