"Net Neutrality" Meets "Speed Matters" at Exec Board's Labor Caucus

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

Today's meeting of the state Democratic Party Labor Caucus was billed asa great debate between "net neutrality" and "speed matters." In theend, however, both sentiments were embraced as resolutions and willlikely be merged somewhere in the murky middle.

The debate came across as abstract and esoteric even to many caucusmembers, much less the general public. But the debate involves a keypublic policy question: who will determine the future of the Internet?

At issue is whether a portion of bandwidth (essentially, the decisionabout how fast of a frequency your Internet will have) should bereserved for telecommucation companies in an effort to expand Internetaccess and improve speed. This could violate the concept of "netneutrality" because companies could contract with some contentproviders to carry their websites at a faster speed. The fear is thatthis would create a "two-lane system" on-line, whereby big contentproviders would be easily and quickly accessible while smaller websiteswould be slow and sluggish.

There's more... 

Cartoon courtesy of codinghorror.com