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Chapter 3 E-business infrastructure 153

channels more because they stream content such as video content which has high band-
width requirements.
Concerns over tiered access to services appear strongest in the United States where two
proposed Bills to help achieve neutrality, the 2006 Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination
Act and 2006 Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act did not
become law. The ISPs were strong lobbyists against these bills and subsequently it has been
alleged that provider Comcast has discriminated against users accessing peer-to-peer traffic
from BitTorrent (Ars Technica, 2007). In European countries such as the UK, ISPs offer dif-
ferent levels of access at different bandwidths.
The second and less widely applied, but equally concerning, concept of net neutrality is
the wish by some governments or other bodies to block access to certain services or content.
For example, the government in China limits access to certain types of content in what has
been glibly called ‘The Great Firewall of China’, see for example (Wired, 2007) which
describes the development of the Golden Shield which is intended to monitor, filter and
block sensitive online content. More recently Google has been criticized for censoring its
search results in China for certain terms such as ‘Tiananmen Square’.

Box 3.4 Ofcom on Net neutrality in Europe and the United States

Ofcom is the regulator of the Internet in the UK. Its position on net neutrality has a clear
description of the potential need for governance on this issue.
The concept of net neutrality
The issue of net neutrality concerns whether and where there should be a principle of
non-discrimination regarding different forms of internet traffic carried across networks.
The communications sector is entering a period where there is rapidly increasing
traffic on the internet, such as video and peer-to-peer applications (for example,
games and VoIP services). This rapid increase in traffic is generating substantial
congestion in some parts of the internet. Moreover many of these applications are
time-sensitive and are far less tolerant of delay than, say, email or web browsing.
To respond to these new applications and their associated demands, service
providers are developing a range of business models that facilitate the prioritisation
of different types of traffic. This is enabled by improvements in network technology
that are allowing greater identification of internet packets associated with different

applications, which can then be prioritised, accordingly.
Ofcom goes on to explain the arguments for and against net neutrality and the current
position in Europe.
Arguments for and against net neutrality

Proponents of net neutrality argue that it is fundamental to the protection of
consumer choice and innovation on the internet, and advocates in the US have cited
the First Amendment to the constitution, arguing that net neutrality is necessary to
ensure freedom of speech. Some large internet application and content companies
tend to be advocates of net neutrality, alongside some consumer rights groups.
Opponents to net neutrality argue that they should be able to offer different qual-
ities of service, both in order to recover their infrastructure investment costs and to
enable quality of service guarantees to improve the consumer experience for ser-
vices such as VoIP or video streaming. In the United States, cable and incumbent
telecom operators have also claimed that the First Amendment supports opposition
to net neutrality, arguing that they cannot be compelled to promote speech with
which they disagree.