History of Net Neutrality

The term "Net Neutrality" is relatively new, but the idea was developed around the age of the telegram back in 1860, and earlier! Telegrams were developed so that they were routed "equally" without discriminating the information being transfered from point a to point b. This network is called the "end-to-end neutral" network.

Telegrams and phone services are carriers under U.S. laws, which means that they are considered useable to public utililties and overseen by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in order to ensure fair access and pricing for use of said devices. Technically, though, the Internet is considered to be under U.S. law as an informational service, not a service of the telecommunications department, thus not subject to the "common carrier" regulations. Because of the Internet's high speed data links, the Internet is not regulated by the common carrier regulations, but because it uses the phone lines, it is qualified and subject to the common carrier regulations.

However, on August 5, 2005, the FCC reclassified DSL services as Informatoinal Services, not Telecommunications Services, thus replacing the well-known common carrier regulations on it. This is wha sparked the initial and lasting debates over whether or not the ISP's should be able to offer different systems for the retrieving of the various Internet services/go against Net Neutrality in order to have the Internet consumer pay to use a service and download and retrieve Internet faster.

Information found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_US

summary by karateman