DALLAS, Jun 30, 2006/ FW/ --- As the Spring 2007 Paris Menswear season kicked off today, our writers and photographers in the City of Lights were already working hard even before I woke up. Yet, with NET NEUTRALITY being in danger of being lost, the denizens of the Internet may not be able to read the reports they filed, i.e. if the U.S. Congress approves a bill that will KILL the Internet, as we know it.

I know this has almost nothing to do with what you will be wearing tomorrow, but it has a lot to do with what you will be seeing tomorrow.

Being a programmer and one of the few people lucky enough to have a detailed understanding of the inner-workings of the Internet, I’d like to attempt to explain what Net-Neutrality really means to the average person in the world.

First, a short history of the Internet, so you can understand who is asking for what, when it comes to recent legislation before the US Congress.

The original design of the Internet was based on ARPANET, created by the US military and Universities around the country. The US TAXPAYERS PAID FOR 100% OF THE INTERNETS' DEVELOPMENT. (NOTE: Not one telecom invested in the development of the internet because there was no money in it, or so they thought).

I'd like to interject a personal note here. The second I saw the design of the Internet. I fell in love and have been there since. This is humankinds greatest gift to itself. The ability to communicate with each other 'live' and share our common experiences cannot be considered anything but incredible.

As the Internet started to grow the ‘price’ to connect to the Internet was passed on to the consumer to pay for the modems and network connections needed. It's like providing you a connection to a network they don't own. You pay for the connection, not the Internet (part of the connection fee you pay goes to pay for the Internet network itself).

As time went on, the telecom companies used the money paid by the consumer to connect to the Internet to build their own networks (you see commercials on TV saying ‘We own our own network!’). The turth is, they don't really 'own' any part of the Internet. They own some wires they hooked up to the Internet.

Today, roughly 93% of the Internet ‘network bandwidth’ is unused. Bandwidth is the ‘amount of data’ the wires can carry between two points. So, you (and all other users on the Internet) only take up 7% of the capacity of the Internet.

The phone companies are telling Congress they need to increase capacity to keep the Internet from slowing down. This is the part that confuses me.

If we were only using 7% now, even if we double our usage (double the hours online per person on the entire planet), we would only be using 14% of the total capacity.

The odd part.

The primary reason for getting this bill through Congress is to standardize the way licensing for TV works in each city (for US readers you may remember some discussion a few years ago about getting ‘local’ stations on your cable TV provider). Each city has it’s own licensing requirements (these are pretty much standard across the country now) so the cable TV providers have to show local channels on their wires. That is just one of the 200 items in the bill before Congress. The remaining 199 items include the ability for Internet providers to decide what content from what locations (networks) they will give ‘preferential treatment’ to.

I’ll explain preferential treatment for data packets. And, until a short time ago, those words did not exist.

When transmitting data from one location to another, there are routers located between the content provider (the server your reading this page from) and you (your computers' connection). Each router is designed to simply transmit the data through the shortest route between the server and you. This is where ‘net-neutrality’ comes into play. With each router simply transmitting the data between point A and point B based on the speed the data is going through the ‘neighbor’ routers, net-neutrality is maintained. If a router goes down, the data is transmitted through the next fastest router (or network). This keeps you connected to places like this site even if a router between the two locations fails. So, your ‘request’ for data (when you click a link) can be transmitted over one network for the first page, and on a second network for the next page (depending on conditions of the networks).

This is where the problems come into play. And, lets not fool ourselves, this is ALL about GREED!

The current bill, sponsored by, written by, and paid for by the telecoms, is just getting a law in place that removes the telecoms requirement to keep their bandwidth available for the general Internet usage.

The telecoms want to ‘limit’ the availability of their networks to the ‘general’ use of the Internet (your requests), and then ‘guarantee’ bandwidth to content providers that pay extra for that newly reserved bandwidth. In other words, if the content provider does not pay the telecom for that reserved bandwidth, the content provider will be transmitted over the non-reserved bandwidth of the telecom or even handed off to another network. If the telecom decides the content provider is not part of their ‘approved’ list of content providers (and this is where their moral decisions impact what you see on the Internet), you may not even be able to access the content providers web site. If the telecom companies limit the non-reserved bandwidth too much, then you may not be able to access entire sections of the Internet for unspecified periods of time. Or, in an even worse case, if the telecoms are all limiting their non-reserved bandwidth (infighting among themselves for a few extra bucks), you may find yourself unable to go anywhere while they work out their issue between themselves. I’ll give an example.

If the content provider does not pay for the reserved bandwidth of any telecom, and that content provider is on a network that is localized to one area (a lot of the Internet connections are actually on localized networks, I bet your connection is localized as well). That content provider may find that most people on the Internet simply cannot access their web site because none of the telecoms want to transfer the data across their network, without the fee involved. It basically creates a ‘you pay me to get your information to my section the network’ system in which ‘any or all’ telecoms can demand money from any content provider (eventhough the content provider has already paid for a giant network connection to the Internet).

This is like telling you that every road in your city just became toll roads owned by different companies. And, if you do not pay extra money to each company, you cannot get to work without going a much longer route. A route in which all the other cars that didn’t pay the new tolls will be going. And eventually, a route in which some accident stops all the cars and you cannot get to work at all. But you can pay 'every company' that owns a road, and they will all guarantee they will get you to work after one of them already took your money to gain access to the road. On top of that, your paying for the best road connection available already. It's just plain double charging.

Please go tell your representative that this might not be a great idea, and should be reviewed in more detail. The telephone companies are really keen on this idea (which means loads and loads of extra money for not doing anything but slowing down the networks, intentionally or otherwise) because they only have to limit bandwidth enough to ‘force’ the content providers to pay those tolls. When a web site is not available, you might say, they are too slow, or they don’t work. Based on the removal of net-neutrality, you wouldn’t know the content provider is just fine and the network is being slowed down so the content provider will pay some telecom a few extra bucks to keep you seeing their page. In the big web sites (search engines, etc.) that's a lot of extra bucks.

If you hear the apple-cart response (there really is an example of the cart and the apples), the telecoms will tell you they are only the carts and the content providers are the apples. When in fact, the telecoms don't own the cart [Internet], they own the road the cart is on (and they all agreed to make all the various types of apples available to everybody when they signed up to be vendors), they want a few bucks from the apple pickers to evenly distribute the apples, no matter which vendor got the money to bring them to market (move the cart down their portion of the road).

Please remember this as well. The content providers are already paying for these huge connections (We pay a lot each month just for the very large connection size needed to send the data to you). It sounds like the telecoms are just looking to get a free ride on the work of the people that put the data into the internet. I suspect their thinking is, "If it's popular, we should get a few extra bucks for keeping it available to everybody.". If it's on the net. IT'S ON THE NET. Don't limit access based on popularity.

The telecoms are telling Congress they must build more infrastructures for the future. We already have plenty of bandwidth to go around, why build more when we don’t need it for the next few decades. The overbuilt Internet has already closed several companies that were building additional networks that were not needed. And they only took 8 years to ‘overbuild’ to the point we are at now. So demanding money for projects decades down the road (that probably will never get built) is not a terribly bright response either.

If you are in the US, please contact whatever politician is currently representing you and tell them to quit taking all that Political Action Committee (PAC) money for making laws that do not make sense.

Don't get me wrong. I also understand the telecoms feel they are being taken advantage of, because content hosted from one telecom can go over the wires of another telecom. But then, they did sign on to this when they built their networks to connect to the Internet. They didn't sign on to it because they were being nice. They signed on to it because WE ARE ALL PAYING for Internet connections from them.

There is another argument that 'middle of nowhere' America doesn't have a T-1 line (or DSL for that matter) available to them, because it costs a lot of money to get the wires out there. I say if 'middle of nowhere' America wants a DSL, then they can pay for the wires themselves. Everybody else paid their own wires, 'middle of nowhere' can pay for theirs too.

I've heard the electric companies are getting on board with broadband access 'everywhere' because of the power involved with electric wires. Perhaps all this 'everybody is using my network' and 'middle of nowhere needs access' will vanish in the next few years. I really mean that. Imagine 100 megabits per second (that's about 3 MP3 music files transfered in 1 second) available to 'everybody' with electricity going to their homes. If you don't know what an MP3 song is, ask anybody with an iPod.

So in conclusion, I say, lets make sure the internet is neutral until all these technologies are brought out. Let the best network access provider win the battle of the customer and business owner. Just my humble opinion.