I’ve often heard the catch phrase “net neutrality” and thought it meant something like “ISPs can’t favor some sites over others on the internet”, or “no censorship of internet sites by ISPs”. So I was all for it. However, a few days ago, after listening to the Joy Cardin show on Wisconsin Public Radio, I discovered that the issues are more complex than I’d imagined. Congress and the FCC are currently writing rules of the road that will affect every internet user, so it’s not a bad time to educate yourself on the broadband traffic situation, and the potential consequences of continuing to insist that the internet act as a “stupid pipe”. Just to take one example, there’s an argument to be made that as long as the net is going to be used to relay time-sensitive data like real-time voice or video communications, routers should be allowed to give those data priority over other data that would not suffer from a few milliseconds of delay between packets. More generally, perhaps ISPs and others should be allowed to discriminate not between sites, but between different data types. Cardin’s guest, Christopher Davies, wrote two columns, one on each side of the issue. You can read those here and here. Here’s the show in its entirety, which WPR members can also download from here.