Net Neutrality. Up to now, the conventional definition of the concept has been that internet service providers shall be prohibited from “blocking or slowing content from some applications or companies” (as quoted from a recent NetworkWorld article). Arguably, the definitive infraction against this particular notion of Net Neutrality was Comcast’s recent ‘managing’ of Bit Torrent traffic via the insertion of spurious connection reset packets.
However, the whole issue the issue of Net Neutrality (at the last mile between the ISP and the consumer, at least) is rapidly becoming a moot point: in preparation for the expected explosion of demand for longer-form video over IP, most major carriers are now scrambling to assemble and/or acquire proprietary content delivery networks (CDN)s to avoid the ever more congested and unpredictable system of routers out there in the public cloud (a recent post about just what Google, Microsoft, and Verizon are up to can be found here).
So while your neighborhood ISP might maintain a commitment to Net Neutrality itself, the real action is well upstream, as major corporations join already established CDN players such as Akamai, Edge Networks, and Yahoo’s Cloudfront to distribute and/or cache digital media content out along the edge of the cloud, in effect forming competing private mini-clouds to minimize the role of the public internet itself.
Put another way, in the purest sense of the term, Net Neutrality has already become something of an anachronism – not due to any localized slowing down of unfavored packets at the ISP level, but due to a globalized speeding up of favored packets on CDNs, before they ever reach the ISP. A recent Wall Street Journal article touches on just this nuanced distinction: according to Google, their recent proprietary internet/CDN initiatives “do not rely on the carrier’s unilateral control over the last-mile connections to consumers, and also do not involve discriminatory intent“ - and even the independent public interest organization Public Knowledge (whose directors include internet academic and Obama advisor Lawrence Lessig) now maintains that “caching in no way is a part of the Net Neutrality issue.”
I’m of the opinion there’s considerably more gray area here. But no matter - since the public internet will simply not scale to meet the anticipated bandwidth demand once short-tail (mainstream) premium digital media over IP becomes widespread, both carriers and content owners will increasingly invest in proprietary content delivery networks - and as consumers buy into the mass-market internet video offerings made possible by these high-performance CDNs, the very concept of Net Neutrality will seem increasingly quaint - and the “internet” as a whole will come to resemble the American health care system: multi-tiered and largely privatized.
So to the extent long-form video over IP ultimately enjoys widespread mass-market success, the innocent ideal of a truly egalitarian and fundamentally neutral internet is destined to end, no matter what your local ISP’s policies are.
Don’t shoot the messenger… 
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