Richard Hall has one pipe to the World Wide Web from his home in a rural area near Rolla, Mo., and he's asking his representative in Congress to make sure no one clogs it.

Hall, an information science professor at the University of Missouri-Rolla, didn't type and mail his missive to Jo Ann Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau. Instead, he recorded his thoughts on a video, posted it on the Internet and sent Emerson a link.

"All this rests on the principle of network neutrality," Hall concluded.

Network neutrality or "net neutrality" is the buzz phrase at the center of a looming debate in Washington, pitting telecom and cable giants such as AT&T against Web titans such as Google, Yahoo! and Amazon — as well as a host of home consumers.

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The Internet is essentially a collection of networks, made of high-speed cables and routers. The routers direct traffic to its final destination and currently treat all content the same, no matter where it comes from — that's net neutrality.

Companies such as Google, which generate large amounts of Internet traffic, fear the networks' owners such as AT&T will establish a system that prioritizes some content over other, so users such as Hall would get faster access to some sites than others.

They worry the networks' owners could create their own content and put it on a bullet train to consumers or allow websites to pay for a faster track. To ward off that possibility, they support federal legislation to require neutrality on the Internet.

So does Hall.

"The Web has allowed it so any person can have a voice," Hall, 49, said. "If the persons who are controlling the network had some sort of vested interest or agenda, then they could suppress whatever kinds of information they wanted to."

Broadband providers haven't outlined plans to do away with net neutrality. But as data zooming across the Internet increase in volume with the rise of streaming video and music downloads, they say certain content should be favored over other content — a heart monitor readout over a streaming TV show, for instance.

And they're fighting the legislation.

Mike McCurry, the head of a coalition supported by broadband providers called Hands Off the Internet, said federal regulation would produce another layer of bureaucracy and stifle the development of broadband networks. The coalition wants to avoid regulation of the Internet beyond the current guidelines under the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

"This would be the exact wrong way to try to use the power of government," said McCurry, a former spokesman for President Bill Clinton who now heads a public relations firm.

Telecom or information?

At the heart of the controversy is whether high-speed Internet service is a "telecommunications service," subject to nondiscrimination rules, or an "information service," which is largely unregulated.

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled the FCC could continue to classify cable Internet as an information service; a few months later, the agency reclassified DSL the same way.

That prompted a move in Congress to require net neutrality, but the measure failed in a House vote, with most Republicans and 58 Democrats in opposition. A similar bill never made it out of a Senate committee.

Missouri's Emerson was one of the opponents. Her spokesman, Jeffery Conner, said her vote reflected her concern that legislation would slow the growth of high-speed Internet access to rural areas in her district.

This year, Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, reintroduced legislation to get net neutrality on the books. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is a co-sponsor.

In the House, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a neutrality advocate, is now chairman of the key committee for Internet legislation. On March 1, that committee began a series of hearings on the "Digital Future of the United States" with testimony from Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the British creator of the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee said the Internet should remain a "white sheet," free and open to innovation. He urged Congress to keep the Internet as it is, with an implied mandate of content neutrality.

Merger concern

Ben Scott is policy director for Save the Internet, which heads up the net neutrality movement and draws its membership from groups across the political spectrum including the Christian Coalition and MoveOn.org. He said mergers such as the one recently between AT&T and BellSouth add validity to the concerns of content control by a "duopoly of cable and telecom companies."

"CEOs of the cable and phone companies went (in 2005) to Wall Street and said very publicly: The rules have changed. We're going to create a pay-to-play system with fast and slow lanes," Scott said.

But McCurry said the Senate bill would take more than three years to implement, and he envisioned a closed-doors group of lobbyists and engineers fighting in a theoretical "Broadband Bureau" of the FCC to parse out the neutrality rules.

Speaking to his fellow Democrats in Congress, he asks, "Do we really want to be the party who brought you the federally regulated Internet?"

Watching the debate with interest are computer users such as Matthew Ridings, president of St. Louis-based MSR Consulting, who makes his living and spends much of his time on the Internet. His company consults for small- to medium-sized businesses on technology issues.

Ridings, 37, said net neutrality was unlikely to affect his clients any time soon. He worries, instead, about Silicon Valley start-ups, where he began his career in the dot-com boom. Those companies rely on a free and unfettered Internet to drive innovation, he said.

"My clients and myself will survive because we do business the way it's done today," he said. "The question is: What's going to happen tomorrow?"