Net neutrality has been a topic of concern since President Bush was in office. I commented above on the situation. Check that thread and see for yourself.

This has been a topic of concern since President Bush was in office. I commented above on the situation. Check that thread and see for yourself.

Please take a look at the thread above that I started. I feel it may be self explanatory. That or you can check out my comments here:
http://intensedebate.com/people/Navilor/comments....

An ISP is like a city, and there are a lot of cities. Think of the internet as the roads and bridges. Now imagine that each city makes sure that only it's residents can drive fast there, and only if they do what the city tells them to do. The city controls the speed of the different vehicles. All other out of city traffic will not enjoy going there because they are forced to move in the slow lane or sometimes even pulled over altogether. Out of town cars are easily identifiable by their license plates (P addresses).

So if I have Acme VoIP (Voice over IP) and someone who I am calling also has Acme VoIP I will get a great connection because they would prioritize calls from outside of their town a bit lower.

The effect to me, as long as I stay within their network, is negligible, possibly a slightly better voice quality because those from out of town are getting trodden upon.

Now let's pretend that I want to call my friend who uses Miracle VoIP. It is working great right up until my city sees that there is a phone call to another network. Both sides can demote the priority of your voice call because it contains packets from the other network.

I don't know about you, but if my phone company (or the other one) degraded the quality of my call because I called someone on another network I would be pissed.

What the proposal is for Net Neutrality is to ban that form of packet shaping. One of the unintended consequences of Comcast's shaping of BitTorrent was that the connections looked a lot like a VPN connection. Imagine those people trying to work from home when all of a sudden their VPN connection slows to a crawl or is disconnected.

While I oppose Big Government and want to see a minimalistic governance there needs to be rules to protect consumers from business practices that harm consumers.

You can check to see if your packets are being shaped by going to this link:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~partha/diffprobe/shaper...

By the way, who would you turn to for service if your internet provider started sabotaging your connections?

An introduction to traffic shaping:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/989209/Traffic-Shaping-...

Comcast throttling their users:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/01/p...

The consequence of an ISP "shaping" their network is that if your VoIP connection goes through someone else's network then your call may degrade or be disconnected. If I use a competitor's website to do something then my ISP may degrade the performance of that connection so I will choose to use their service.

Bittorrent is used by many people in the IT industry. Degrading that performance will impact our performance.

One reason that they would want to prioritize traffic is so that they don't have to upgrade their networks even though

Point:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2365...
(He actually misses the point of net neutrality by saying that we will subsidize high bandwidth users. This is factually incorrect. It is designed to keep your traffic from being prioritized lower when going through some other companies network.)

Counterpoint.
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2702