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http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6929

Net neutrality threatened by market forces
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, January 28th, 2008

Massive websites like Amazon may one day be able to pay for more information roadspace than smaller sites.

David Pullmer / The McGill Daily

As most people won’t wait more than four seconds for a page to load, the speed of delivery on the net has become more important than ever. In recent years, this need for speed has pitted companies that provide Internet services against web sites who want as much traffic as possible. What is at stake is net neutrality – the current state of affairs in which users can access Internet sites with equal speed, regardless of whether the site is eBay or mcgill.ca.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) act as the intermediary information carriers between users and web sites. In recent years, in what has become largely a battle of revenues, ISPs have sought to implant tiered network infrastructure and charge web sites – or content providers – for services.

Large content providers, such as Yahoo!, eBay, and Google, receive much of their revenues from new applications and advertising. Their wealth depends in large part on the masses of visitors to their site. Dr. Muthucumaru Maheswaran, a computer science professor at McGill, explains that the ISPs, who make it possible for sites like eBay to have so many visitors, want a piece of the revenue pie.

“The people who actually make the networks are anxious because they’re not sharing that wealth,” he said.
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