Shaddows - 3:22 pm on Mar 10, 2009 (gmt 0)

I thought it was about avoiding traffic prioritisation on one hand, and de-politicising admin (think ICANN) on the other.

The whole point is that MS, for eg, could pay to make their traffic traverse the net quicker. Amazon could pay for more bandwidth across the net. Other Big Brands cold do the same, creating barriers of entry for others.

The pro-prioritisation camp are generally Carriers and ISPs, who argue the net will grind to a halt as spammers and iPlayer clog up the tubes. Those with valuable (read: monetised) content can pay to make sure they arent affected by these leeches, while simultaneously funding developement in the infrastructure of the next 100 years.

Net Neutralists say this is a load of money grabbing tosh, that people should be able to have equal rights in content availability, that Big Business should not have an implicit advantage, and that those who run our infrastructure have been asleep at the wheel. They think funding for infrastructure should come from someone other than content providers- quite often ISPs or tax payers.

ISPs already advertise "unlimited broadband" when official responses to traffic-shaping objections indicate something like 5% of users take 95% or resources, begging the question of what would happen if 20% of theri customers adopted similar usage patters.

Tax payers... well why not, we seem to be paying for everything else