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AT A PREMIUM Online video is one of the services that ISPs in the U.S. want to charge extra to access

The tussle over allocation of spectrum for wireless services grabbed the headlines in the U.S. but there is an even bigger debate that is brewing in the background and threatens to set the precedent for the rest of the world, after all most Internet policy evolves in the U.S.

The US Justice Department recently stirred up the debate on “Network Neutrality” by saying “Internet service providers (ISPs) should be allowed to charge for priority traffic.” The agency said it was opposed to the idea of network neutrality.

What is network neutrality? Well, it has been in practice for quite some years now, and the most popular accepted definition for the term is by Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. He said: “Network neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally.”

Actually, the term can even be traced back to 1860, when a US federal law subsidising a coast-to-coast telegraph line was formulated. It said: “Messages received from any individual, company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of their reception, excepting that the dispatches of the government shall have priority.”

It is not wrong to say that network neutrality is the reason why the Internet is what it is today. The ISP today is merely the pipe that carries the data to you without bothering about what the contents of the data are. When the Internet was formed it was a military-funded research network governed by an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) prohibiting commercial activity. In the 90s, it was thrown open, and commercial and non-commercial services have prospered with the knowledge that the network treats everyone equally. For the lay user there has been freedom of choice in terms of content with the ISPs competing only on price, service or speed.

But today ISPs and crucially telecom companies are up in arms demanding that the unwritten policy changes, with support from free market lobby groups. The reason for their angst — the stunning growth of Web 2.0 services such as video, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and file sharing. The ISPs feel the services demand too much of their infrastructure, thus people need to pay for access to certain content which requires more bandwidth. While the telecom companies are definitely being threatened by VoIP.

To add fuel to the flames, both the ISPs and telecom companies are peeved at the money content providers are making. “They don’t have any fibre out there. They don’t have any wires. They use my lines for free — and that’s bull. For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts,” thundered AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. recently.

Two of the strongest supporters of network neutrality are — Microsoft and Google, who are direct competitors in their businesses today. They are united in their support simply because they lose if they have to pay to deliver the content or the user has to pay more to access it.

Groups of civil rights activists have already formed a coalition ( www.savetheinternet.com). They say the net should be like a canal and not care about what travels on it. They argue that ISPs could “unfairly discriminate and control which data they prioritise, such as data from their own sponsors or media interests.” Also they say it could eventually lead to denial of service like some countries such as the UAE blocking popular VoIP application Skype and censorship like practiced in Saudi Arabia and China. And worldwide, the Bittorrent application for file sharing is widely given reduced bandwidth or some cases blocked.

Within two months of its establishment Savetheinternet collected over 1,000,000 signatures and delivered them to the U.S. Congress in favour of a network neutrality policies. By the close of 2006 they had collected more than 1.5 million signatures, effectively stalling any legislation in that didn’t write net neutrality protections into law.

This is one debate that is going to be long-drawn and fought tooth and nail, and the resolution will be definitely felt by the lay users around the world.

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