Network Neutrality - Development of The Concept

Development of The Concept

The concept of network neutrality predates the current Internet-focused debate, existing since the age of the telegraph. In 1860, a US federal law (Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860) was passed to subsidize a telegraph line, stating that:

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 ... —An act to facilitate communication between the Atlantic and Pacific states by electric telegraph, June 16, 1860.

In 1888, Almon Brown Strowger invented an automatic telephone exchange to bypass non-neutral telephone operators who redirected calls for profit.

In 2003, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, published and popularized a proposal for a net neutrality rule, in his paper Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination. The paper considered network neutrality in terms of neutrality between applications, as well as neutrality between data and QoS-sensitive traffic, and proposed some legislation to potentially deal with these issues. Throughout 2005 and 2006, network neutrality and the future of the Internet was debated by cable companies, consumers, and Internet service providers (ISPs), although the issue was almost completely ignored by the media until 2006.

In August 2010, Google and Verizon reached an agreement in which they both opposed complete network neutrality. The agreement details that ISPs should be "prohibited from preventing users of its broadband Internet access service from-- (1) sending and receiving lawful content of their choice; (2) running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice; and (3) connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service." They went on to say that wireless ISPs, such as cellphone companies, should not be required to provide neutral networks for their customers. The rationale for this statement was that wireless networks are still being developed.