Imagine. That's the word often used when starting a conversation about the Internet. Perhaps that's because the Internet has ignited an explosion of creative entrepreneurship that equals—and possibly even surpasses—any in human history. As a result, we live in a world shaped by products and technologies that no one could have imagined 10 years ago, a world that changes almost daily. Want to balance your checking account, pay for your next car wash and download music, while talking for free to your good friend (a fellow Chihuahua lover) from Switzerland whom you've never actually met in person? It's just a few clicks away.

Like the nation's system of interstate highways, the Internet has become not only indispensable for the lifestyles we live, it's also a driving force behind how those lifestyles continue to evolve and the economies that fund them. Although much of the Internet's potential is still unknown to us—imagine where it will take us in another 15 years—its ability to earn money is undisputed. Perhaps because of this, the Internet we know and love has become the focus of a growing conflict that could change the way the information superhighway operates, impacting our lives and society in ways that may be hard to imagine today.

On one side of the conflict are the big broadband Internet service providers (ISPs)—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc.—who want greater control over the information that flows through their "pipes" and feel entitled to a greater share of the profits. On the other are hundreds of small businesses and nonprofits, and millions of individual Americans who don't want big business meddling with their Internet.

Those who haven't heard the term "network neutrality" soon will. The term began to spread about a year ago when a bill was introduced into Congress that would have, among other things, given ISPs more control over which information gets priority on their networks. The bill—HR 5252, The Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act, nicknamed the COPE Act—got lots of support from Big Telecom and passed the House. A proposed amendment that would have prohibited ISPs from discriminating against lawful Internet content—the Markey Amendment—died in committee on a tie vote.

The COPE Act failed when its companion bill in the Senate failed to reach a vote, in part the result of a groundswell of opposition that delivered more than a million signatures to Congress. But the bill's demise didn't stop the debate, and as the 110th Congress moves past its first 100 hours, Internet freedom is already back on the agenda.

What's at stake, say some experts, is nothing less than the future of the Internet itself.

Superhighway or dirt road?

Any discussion of network neutrality inevitably resorts to metaphors. Fast lanes and slow lanes. Toll booths. Book stores and endcaps. KFC and Pepsi vs. McDonald's and Coke. The phone system vs. the postal system. Electrical outlets that accept toasters as readily as computers, and so on. Of course, these metaphors have their limitations because there's really nothing like the Internet. So, it helps to understand something about how the Internet functions.

When you sit down and log on to your ISP, the signals you send travel through a complex relay of routers, ultimately finding their way to the destination you've requested. Each group of signals—your e-mail to your mother, your Internet search for designer doggie clothing, your voice-over IP (VoIP) Skype conversation with your Chihuahua-loving friend in Switzerland—is a "packet" of information that travels at incredible speeds through this network. In the Internet's original incarnation, these packets were treated largely the same, zipping along their fiber-optic paths, limited by technology but not human interference.

Because of this, people often refer to the Internet as a "dumb" carrier that transmits the information it is asked to transmit without much interference. Many believe that it's this "dumb" quality—neutrality—that makes the Internet so wonderful.

"[The Internet's] decentralized and mostly neutral nature may account for its success as an economic engine and source of folk culture," writes Tim Wu, co-author of Who Controls the Internet? and a professor at Columbia Law School. Wu is credited with coining the term "network neutrality."

Big Telecom, however, sees an opportunity to make more money by controlling the flow of these packets. Already technologically capable of telling one packet from another, telecom companies give priority to their own VoIP packets. But they have been lobbying Congress, pushing for legislation that would allow them greater control by enabling them to charge content providers like Google, YouTube, and eBay for faster delivery of information.

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters at the Washinginton Post that ISPs ought to be free to charge Yahoo for the opportunity to have its content load faster than that of competing search engine, Google.

The big ISPs justify imposing additional charges by pointing to companies, like Google, that have made billions online and claiming that such companies are getting a "free lunch" by profiting off their networks.

"Now what they would like to do is use my pipes for free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," said Ed Whitacre, AT&T's chief executive officer, last November.

Whitacre's grammatically incorrect argument is often summed up among ISP-industry brass like this: "Someone has to pay for the pipes."

True enough, say critics, but someone is already paying.

"We are already paying for this," says Craig Aaron, spokesman for SaveTheInternet.com, a coalition of more than 800 businesses and organizations spanning the political spectrum. "You don't get on the Internet every month for free... These companies are also paying a lot. Google does not pay $39.95 to get on the Internet. They pay tens of millions or probably more to get all their computers going. So these companies are already getting paid. They're getting paid by consumers, and they're getting paid by companies. And now they want to set an extra toll booth in the middle."

This proposed system of toll booths, to use Aaron's metaphor, would lead to an information superhighway on which those who had the money to pay would get their information through the pipes faster than those who couldn't afford the extra fees.

"There's going to be a fast lane on that Internet, and in the fast lane you're going to be able to get everything that AT&T or Verizon or Qwest has to offer and you're going get the content of a few corporate partners who've made deals with them and that's going to come at a higher quality of service—faster speeds, quicker downloads," Aaron says. "Everybody else who isn't able to afford or isn't offered one of these special deals, well, unfortunately, they're going to be left in the slow lane, the cyber equivalent of a winding dirt road."

The Internet has always been a meritocracy where websites and services succeed or fail based on the quality of their work, he says.

"If you can attract a big audience, if you can get a lot of clicks, your little website, your little idea that you started in your garage can be the next Google or eBay," he says. "You can compete with the biggest companies out there. If you get rid of network neutrality, you take away that meritocracy. You take away that democratic process, and you put the decisions of what's going to succeed or fail into the hands of a roomful of phone or cable company executives. And suddenly the free and open Internet we've always had starts to look like a cable television system."

Tony Soprano's Internet

For people like Denver businessman Al Smerker, that could spell catastrophe. Smerker, owner of Antazen.com, provides system integration for companies wanting to do business over the Internet. When the car wash down the street decides it can become more profitable if its customers are able to purchase codes for car washes online, Smerker and his two employees set to work making that goal a reality.

Smerker says his company has become successful in the systems-integration field—a business dominated by giant players like IBM—precisely because the Internet is a meritocracy that judges businesses not by size or advertising campaigns, but by the services offered and the quality of a company's work.

"It's a level playing field," he says. "I can go head to head against IBM and the larger companies. I'm able to compete, and people don't know I'm a small three-man shop. They judge me on what I do."

If his ISP were allowed to sell IBM faster content delivery, that level playing field would disappear. Potential clients searching for his services would find it easier to download information from IBM than from his business and potentially putting him and his clients out of business.

"They're not going to turn my site off, they're just going to make it so that anyone trying to go to my site is taking a round-about route," he says.

But time is money, especially on the Internet, where the average user waits all of 22 seconds for a site to load before giving up and going elsewhere. By creating an Internet "slow lane," the ISPs would hurt small business and squelch the creation of new businesses and technologies.

"We will lose customers on the front end, and on the back end we'll lose businesses," he says.

Interested in preserving the Internet rules that made his business successful, Smerker was one of 16,000 area residents to sign a petition asking Sen. Ken Salazar to support network neutrality, an issue on which Salazar has yet to take a stance. Although Smerker says he has nothing against big business, he believes the telecom companies are trying to "double-dip" into the lucre generated by the Internet, charging both for access and then for mobility. Their claim that someone needs to pay for the pipes is flawed, he says, because taxpayers have already contributed in rich government subsidies to establish these networks.

"It's not their infrastructure," Smerker says of the "pipes." "They definitely had a role in putting it together, but they wouldn't have been able to do it without government subsidies and tax breaks."

Besides, says Smerker, he already pays for Internet access.

"I already pay a ton that way, so I don't really see why we have to continue to pay more and more to these people," he says. "They're not trying to do any value-add. It's almost like they're doing extortion."

It's not just small Internet business owners who oppose such plans, but the big companies, as well. Google has made it quite clear that it will file an anti-trust lawsuit against any ISP that demands money from content providers for preferred delivery.

Writes Wu: "No neutrality rule should be a bar to building better networks that do more. But what must be banned are blocking, gratuitous discrimination and choosing favorites. While it's one way to earn cash, it's just too close to the Tony Soprano vision of networking: Use your position to make threats and extract payments. This is similar to the outlawed, but still common, 'payola' schemes in the radio world. Yes, there's money in such schemes, but they aren't good for the industry or the country."

'Net politics

While businesses worry about the impact that Big Telecom's plans will have on the Internet's level playing field and on innovation, nonprofit organizations spanning the political spectrum are worried about Internet freedom.

"We kind of summarize the beauty of the Internet as economic innovation, democratic participation and free speech online," says Adam Green, communications director for MoveOn.org. "These are the areas that will be hurt the most. At MoveOn, we kind of focus on the democracy and free speech."

MoveOn.org got its start as an $89 website launched by a California couple who disagreed with the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The petition they placed on their site eventually got 500,000 signatures.

"At this point we're at 3.2 million members," says Green. "Our e-mail costs relatively nothing, and we can mobilize millions of people to take part in their democracy."

Green cites Colorado's ProgressNow.org as another example of people taking their concerns to the Internet and having a profound impact on democracy. But the ability to use the Internet as a tool for political and social organizing is threatened the moment someone erects barriers to entry, Green says.

"In this country no one would ever argue that our entire road system should be owned by private corporations who get to choose which trucks get through and who have the ability to prevent their competitors from entering the road system," he says. "These companies want to be very self-interested actors. They want to make sure their competitors can't compete and that political views that they oppose can't compete."

Quest CEO Dick Notebaert said on Thursday, Jan. 11, that Internet neutrality legislation is "nuts," calling it a "preposterous charge" that any telecom company would block or degrade somebody's Internet service. He echoes other ISP representatives, including William Barr, counsel for Verizon, who referred to concerns about network neutrality as "nonsense" and "jibber-jabber" and pointed out—much to his own embarrassment—that there were no examples of ISPs blocking service.

But as Green and other free Internet advocates are quick to point out, it has happened.

In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service. In 2005, a Canadian ISP in the midst of a labor dispute blocked its users from accessing the website that was sympathetic to workers. Though these are only two examples, they offer proof of what's possible. An ISP can block users from using services or receiving content.

But the motivation for control of the networks has less to do with politics and more to do with the ka-ching of cash, Green suggests.

He says he recently sat through a meeting with executives from Verizon, discussing the objections the company has to Internet neutrality legislation.

"Eventually it just got down to the funding question," he says. "I raised the question of public funding and said, 'What if we just supported public funding for infrastructure?' There was this long pause, and then they said, 'That wouldn't help Verizon.' It's not about the public good. It's not about building out the Internet. It's about their bottom line."

Rather than waiting for some terrible breach of freedom to occur, Green and other members of SaveTheInternet.com want to be proactive. To that end, they've rolled out their Declaration of Internet Freedom, calling for certain established Internet rights, including universal affordable access; an open and neutral network that offers maximum choice to consumers; and world-class quality through competition.

"We want to democratize the Internet and keep it open," he says.

In search of good policy

Last week Sens. Bryon Dorgan, D-N.D.., and Olympia Snow, R-M.E., introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007, reopening a debate that last year ended in stalemate. The introduction of the bill, which prohibits ISPs from discriminating against content, came less than two weeks after AT&T conceded to network neutrality for two years as a condition for the approval of its merger with BellSouth.

But experts warn that clumsy legislation designed to protect Internet freedom might not bring Internet users what they expect.

Dirk Grunwald and Douglas Sicker, both professors of computer science at the University of Colorado, say that the public needs to think of network neutrality in three tiers.

The first upper-level tier involves access to information, media consolidation and freedom of speech issues, the sorts of things that most people think of when they hear the phrase "Internet freedom."

"If we ignore this, we're going to ignore what the Internet will mean for us in the future and that it will be a major forum for democracy," Grunwald says. "That is absolutely crucial."

The second level is technological. What is truly possible on the Internet now? What might be possible in the future? It might be necessary, even desirable, to differentiate or discriminate between types of content, depending on how various models of the Internet unfold.

Grunwald and Sicker site a broadband Internet development in Utah in which municipalities joined together to create Utopia, a poster-child, network-neutral Internet carrier system. If Utopia is prohibited from discriminating between various kinds of content, then its customers will be forced to receive their VoIP service at the same rate as their Web surfing service. Anyone who's tried to have a Skype conversation over a 56K modem knows what this means—long delays and constant breaks in the conversation.

Grunwald and Sicker explain this by suggesting an imaginary law that applied the same standards of delivery to telephone service and snail mail. Such a law would require either speeding the delivery of snail mail to that of a phone call or slowing down phone calls so that the local number you dial today rings tomorrow.

"Poorly crafted network neutrality legislation would be to say these are both ways to get data to someone, and we're going to apply the same set of rules to both of these things," Grunwald says.

Clumsy legislation could hinder the development of better, faster Internet products and services, they say.

The third tier involves regulation and the need for healthy competition. Many of the concerns surrounding Internet neutrality would vanish if there were more facilities-based ISPs competing for business. In other words, there'd be less worry about control if more companies owned pipes because Internet users would have more options.

Sicker, who once worked at the FCC, says we've moved away from the concept of "common carriage"—the idea that certain utilities should be available to everyone equally—in favor of a competition-based model. But we've seen a move toward consolidation and away from competition, a situation that exacerbates the problems surrounding the neutrality issue. In fact, the big telephone and cable companies have a history of trying to block competition. This is what motivated the decision to break up the Bell system and allow for competition in the long-distance markets, such as MCI and Sprint.

"We went through a period where there was radical change, but now we're seeing this consolidation happening and maybe even worse in that the media and everything else is all being tied into these consolidated communication channels," he says. "There's a potential that we could get much less diversity of information to the masses."

Good network neutrality legislation would protect content and access, while allowing the technologically necessary discrimination and encouraging or possibly even mandating high levels of competition. Grunwald and Sicker are still waiting to see someone introduce a bill into Congress that fits this description.

In the meantime, the Democratic majority in Congress ensures a friendlier environment for network-neutrality legislation than existed last year. Green and Aaron say they're both hopeful that the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007, which has bipartisan support, will pass the Senate.

"The old, crusty chairmen of the committees that bottled this up are now gone, and more public-minded people are in those positions, so we expect this agenda to advance," Green says.

But that doesn't mean neutrality advocates are easing up on their campaign.

"The prospects are certainly a lot better than they've ever been," Aaron says. "We're optimistic, but we're not counting our chickens."

For more information, go to www.SaveTheInternet.org [1] or www.timwu.org [2].