Werner Vogels led a session on network neutrality. What is net neutrality - or net discrimination?

First, understand that the phone and cable companies will fundamentally alter the internet in America unless Congress acts to stop them.

They have the market power. Consumers have little or no choice, even though they think that they do. Of the 35 million broadband customers, only 1% have a choice of broadband provider.

Telecos want to resell access to you - the consumer - to the people who develop content. They will use their market power to restrict consumer choice. Example: Canadian teleco blocking access to union site during strike.

Telecos have proposed a two-tiered plan. First, a closed fast lane, which they own, for their content. It's what cable does now. Telecos want to become video providers. [Note: look at ownership of cable teleco and corporate media.]

And second, there will be an open, but slow lane. Paid police escort exists in the slow lane -- if you pay the police they will escort you thru the slow lane. [Like the frequent flier "skip the wait" line at airports.] However, the telecos will limit available police escort and auction it to the highest bidder. There is no incentive for telecos to do this any other way.

There were two amendments to the Senate bill to provide consumer safeguards. First, telecos can prioritize content can only be done based on the level of bandwidth purchased by the customer. Second, terms for local content injection must be fair.

Concepts: Powell's Internet Freedoms

• Freedom to access content
• Freedom to use applications
• Freedom to attach personal deivers
• Freedom to obtain service plan info
• Freedom to obtain guaranteed "Basic Internet Service"

Observation: even this audience is a hard sell ... and this is a very geeky audience! No wonder it's hard to get consumers to understand or be interested in this issue. :-/

Edited to add link to Issue Overview and clean up grammar, punctuation, capitalization.

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