The title of this entry is being bounced around an awful lot lately. With big telecommunications companies (“Delivery”) being against it, supported by their “free press” and propaganda. Meanwhile, those considered “Big Content” are all for it, along with a great number of people online.

What does it mean? What does it mean to those at home?

Let’s first lay down some facts. Every year, bandwidth (the size of the “pipes”) become cheaper to operate and maintain. Every year, the telecommunications companies are making more and more profit. So, for Internet Service Providers, it is getting cheaper and cheaper to operate their businesses, providing greater dividends to their shareholders.

In addition, previous business models for delivering home entertainment (cable TV) are beginning to show their age and lack of delivering what people really want. They also charge an awful lot for very little in the way of truly targeted content. Why, when given the choice, would people choose Cable TV over services such as Hulu or iTunes for watching their TV shows. Many major networks are already making their shows available for free to watch online. So why pay through the nose for something that doesn’t give you what you actually want, when you want it at an affordable price?

Okay, so that’s the background.

Network Neutrality is very simple: No Internet Service Provider (ISP) may charge content providers to allow access to their service. This means that an ISP (for example, let’s say Shaw) is not allowed to charge a content provider (let’s say CBC) for their website and content to be available to Shaw’s clients.

This is one aspect of network neutrality, content providers are already paying for bandwidth to their ISP. What providers who directly interact with the public want to do is charge content providers AGAIN so that their websites are fast and that any services they provide operate at an appropriate speed. They feel that companies, such as Google, should pay to use their networks.

However, the public and that provider have already paid for their service. This sums up as simply one thing: double dipping. The providers have already made scandalous amounts of money and want to claim that this will help innovation. The only innovation they’re referring to however is the fact that they too want in on the content game.

Providers want to control access since their cash cow that is cable TV is dying out and they want a new way to make that money. Instead of innovating themselves, they’re actually trying to artificially limit competition and provide themselves the edge, by crippling internet access to their competition.

This would also prevent new competition without deep pockets from being able to compete on the same level.

That sounds a lot more like stifling competition and inhibiting innovation, does it not?

Those same ISPs are saying they’re losing money on their networks when they can’t charge content providers for the data they send across their networks-when it’s already been more than paid for by customers.

The often tossed around FUD about having to charge customers more each year for bandwidth because they’re not allowed to control abusers is also un-true. They still have the option of throttling that users ENTIRE set of traffic, which is not abuse but simple and easy network management. Network neutrality only stipulates that there can’t be selective control of sites and protocols. Bandwidth is getting cheaper and if an ISP is advertising that a service is “unlimited” they are committing fraud, which can’t be used to support their argument.

Network neutrality is trying to prevent those ISPs from price gouging and (ab)using the monopolies that many of them have tried to enforce using legislation and bullying. It is meant to prevent them from abusing their positions to artificially kill off competition.

Any claims otherwise can be easily refuted. Just check their earnings reports.