On May 13 the University of Maine held a commencement ceremony where business, social work, special education and psychology students from coastal Belfast earned their degrees. In Belfast, University of Maine courses and programs are considered part of the Belfast community because of the Hutchinson Center, a state of the art facility in terms of distance education and on-site, off-campus programming 65 miles from Orono.

These graduating students didn't take valuable time off work each week to commute to the Orono campus. They used the Internet to receive many of their courses, combined with on-site, weekend courses more convenient to their work schedules and midcoast location.

While this opportunity literally didn't exist for their parents or grandparents or, in all likelihood, even their older siblings, University of Maine courses offered at the Hutchinson Center, across the state of Maine and beyond its borders through the use of the Internet and videoconferencing have become increasingly popular. In fact, this past year the University of Maine experienced over 8,000 enrollments in distance learning courses with more than 24,000 credit hours completed at a distance.

But all of this innovation and progress is now in danger of being halted in its tracks — threatened by network operators like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T which plan to use their virtual monopoly market power to completely alter the structure of the Internet. They would like to set up toll booths and choke points for content from organizations like the University of Maine System, which already pays network operators hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for its campuses' access to the Internet.

Since its beginning, the Internet has been guided by a principle called network neutrality which means that information flows through the net openly and that network operators do not discriminate or examine content as it travels through the network. This structure allows the Internet to be very economical and since the network intelligence is in the hands of the users — not the network providers — the Internet was able to foster the development of all of the technology innovations that we use routinely today like the Web, e-mail and online education courses.

The Internet's low cost of entry coupled with its ability to exchange information widely and freely facilitated the creation and broad adoption of these market- making innovations.

The network operators are now proposing to create a two-tiered network infrastructure that allows only certain applications onto a "premium" Internet lane leaving universities, entrepreneurs, consumers, small businesses and any other individuals without deep pockets to the slower lane. Taxpayers of our state already pay hard-earned money to support state-funded organizations like our universities, libraries, K-12 schools and museums.

Under the network operators' plan, these vital distance learning courses and other Internet related educational programs may be cut due to already scarce education resources. Consumers, small businesses, students and other innovators also unable to pay these premium fees would also be left behind in their ability to compete and make their inventions readily available to the public via the Internet.

The network operators' plans to violate network neutrality to create tiered networks will only inject more complexity, and cost into operating networks and at the same time create incompatible networks with no standards for performance. And while quality network access will cost more, the resulting infrastructure will be technically capable of far less, diminishing the United States' traditional leadership role in the development of Internet technologies.

For example, today, students and faculty at the University of Maine in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and other research labs and schools are engaged in developing new life-changing technologies like those in the areas of biomedical engineering. With the two-tiered Internet being proposed, what may be the fast lane for the University of Maine, may be the slow lane for the NIH rendering collaboration opportunities futile.

Similarly, new services developed by entrepreneurs that may perform reliably on one provider's network, may completely fail on another's, making the development and broad adoption of new technology nearly impossible.

The Internet today enables rich two-way interactive communications and education. As students in Belfast can tell you, it enables access to education resources in ways that weren't possible just a few years ago. The Internet's further development promises to bring people together in new ways, to expand commerce and to create jobs. But we have only begun to uncover its potential.

Protecting the principle of network neutrality is vitally important to the future of the Internet, the state of Maine and our nation. Telecom reform efforts underway in Washington, D.C., should serve to empower our citizens and communities of tomorrow, not enrich and protect the network service providers of today.

— John H. Gregory is executive director of Information Technologies at the University of Maine. Ralph Caruso is chief information officer at the University of Maine System.