Net neutrality
Net neutrality, sometimes referred to as network neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers must treat all Internet communications equally, offering users and online content providers consistent transfer rates regardless of content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication. Net neutrality was advocated for in the 1990s by the presidential administration of Bill Clinton in the United States. Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934. In 2025, an American court ruled that Internet companies should not be regulated like utilities, which weakened net neutrality regulation and put the decision in the hands of the United States Congress and state legislatures.
Supporters of net neutrality argue that it prevents ISPs from filtering Internet content without a court order, fosters freedom of speech and democratic participation, promotes competition and innovation, prevents dubious services, and maintains the end-to-end principle, and that users would be intolerant of slow-loading websites. Opponents argue that it reduces investment, deters competition, increases taxes, imposes unnecessary regulations, prevents the Internet from being accessible to lower-income individuals, and prevents Internet traffic from being allocated to the most needed users, that large ISPs already have a performance advantage over smaller providers, and that there is already significant competition among ISPs with few competitive issues.
Etymology
The term was coined by Columbia University media law professor Tim Wu in 2003 as an extension of the longstanding concept of a common carrier which was used to describe the role of telephone systems.Regulatory considerations
Net neutrality regulations may be referred to as common carrier regulations. Net neutrality does not block all abilities that ISPs have to impact their customers' services. Opt-in and opt-out services exist on the end user side, and filtering can be done locally, as in the filtering of sensitive material for minors.Research suggests that a combination of policy instruments can help realize the range of valued political and economic objectives central to the network neutrality debate. Combined with public opinion, this has led some governments to regulate broadband Internet services as a public utility, similar to the way electricity, gas, and the water supply are regulated, along with limiting providers and regulating the options those providers can offer.
Proponents of net neutrality, which include computer science experts, internet policy experts, and several non-profit organizations, and Internet content providers, assert that net neutrality helps to provide freedom of information exchange, promotes competition and innovation for Internet services, and upholds standardization of Internet data transmission which was essential for its growth.
Opponents of net neutrality, which include ISPs, computer hardware manufacturers, economists, technologists and telecommunications equipment manufacturers, argue that net neutrality requirements would reduce their incentive to build out the Internet and reduce competition in the marketplace, and may raise their operating costs, which they would have to pass along to their users.
Definition and related principles
Internet neutrality
Network neutrality is the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. According to Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, a public information network will be most useful when this is the case.Internet traffic consists of various types of digital data sent over the Internet between all kinds of devices, using hundreds of different transfer technologies. The data includes email messages; HTML, JSON, and all related web browser MIME content types; text, word processing, spreadsheet, database and other academic, business or personal documents in any conceivable format; audio and video files; streaming media content; and countless other formal, proprietary, or ad-hoc schematic formats—all transmitted via myriad transfer protocols.
Indeed, while the focus is often on the type of digital content being transferred, network neutrality includes the idea that if all such types are to be treated equally, then it follows that any ostensibly arbitrary choice of protocol—that is, the technical details of the actual communications transaction itself—must be as well. For example, the same digital video file could be accessed by viewing it live while the data is being received, interacting with its playback from a remote server, by receiving it in an email message, or by downloading it from either a website, an FTP server, or via BitTorrent, among other means. Although all of these use the Internet for transport, and the content received locally is ultimately identical, the interim data traffic is dramatically different depending on which transfer method is used. To proponents of net neutrality, this suggests that prioritizing any one transfer protocol over another is generally unprincipled, or that doing so penalizes the free choices of some users.
In sum, net neutrality is the principle that an ISP be required to provide access to all sites, content, and applications at the same speed, under the same conditions, without blocking or giving preference to any content. Under net neutrality, whether a user connects to Netflix, Wikipedia, YouTube, or a family blog, their ISP must treat them all the same. Without net neutrality, an ISP can influence the quality that each experience offers to end users, which suggests a regime of pay-to-play, where content providers can be charged to improve the exposure of their own products versus those of their competitors.
Open Internet
Under an open Internet system, the full resources of the Internet and means to operate on it should be easily accessible to all individuals, companies, and organizations. Applicable concepts include: net neutrality, open standards, transparency, lack of Internet censorship, and low barriers to entry. The concept of the open Internet is sometimes expressed as an expectation of decentralized technological power, and is seen by some observers as closely related to open-source software, a type of software program whose maker allows users access to the code that runs the program, so that users can improve the software or fix bugs. Proponents of net neutrality see neutrality as an important component of an open Internet, wherein policies such as equal treatment of data and open web standards allow those using the Internet to easily communicate, and conduct business and activities without interference from a third party.In contrast, a closed Internet refers to the opposite situation, wherein established persons, corporations, or governments favor certain uses, restrict access to necessary web standards, artificially degrade some services, or explicitly filter out content. Some countries such as Thailand block certain websites or types of sites, and monitor and/or censor Internet use using Internet police, a specialized type of law enforcement, or secret police. Other countries such as Russia, China, and North Korea also use similar tactics to Thailand to control the variety of Internet media within their respective countries. In comparison to the United States or Canada for example, these countries have far more restrictive Internet service providers. This approach is reminiscent of a closed platform system, as both ideas are highly similar. These systems all serve to hinder access to a wide variety of Internet service, which is a stark contrast to the idea of an open Internet system.
Dumb pipe
The term dumb pipe was coined in the early 1990s and refers to water pipes used in a city water supply system. In theory, these pipes provide a steady and reliable source of water to every household without discrimination. In other words, it connects the user with the source without any intelligence or decrement. Similarly, a dumb network is a network with little or no control or management of its use patterns.Experts in the high-technology field will often compare the dumb pipe concept with smart pipes and debate which one is best applied to a certain portion of Internet policy. These conversations usually refer to these two concepts as being analogous to the concepts of open and closed Internet respectively. As such, certain models have been made that aim to outline four layers of the Internet with the understanding of the dumb pipe theory:
- Content Layer: Contains services such as communication as well as entertainment videos and music.
- Applications Layer: Contains services such as e-mail and web browsers.
- Logical Layer : Contains various Internet protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP.
- Physical Layer: Consists of services that provide all others such as cable or wireless connections.
End-to-end principle
They argued that, in addition to any processing in the intermediate systems, reliable systems tend to require processing in the end-points to operate correctly. They pointed out that most features in the lowest level of a communications system impose costs for all higher-layer clients, even if those clients do not need the features, and are redundant if the clients have to re-implement the features on an end-to-end basis. This leads to the model of a minimal dumb network with smart terminals, a completely different model from the previous paradigm of the smart network with dumb terminals. Because the end-to-end principle is one of the central design principles of the Internet, and because the practical means for implementing data discrimination violate the end-to-end principle, the principle often enters discussions about net neutrality. The end-to-end principle is closely related and sometimes seen as a direct precursor to the principle of net neutrality.