Good news today on the net neutrality front: as a condition of being permitted to merge with BellSouth, AT&T has agreed to adhere to net neutrality for two years, or until Congress passes a net neutrality bill. Short version, from a good analysis by Columbia law prof Tim Wu:
“AT&T/BellSouth also commits that it will maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service. This commitment shall be satisfied by AT&T/BellSouth’s agreement not to provide or to sell to Internet content, application, or service providers, including those affiliated with AT&T/BellSouth, any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes any packet transmitted over AT&T/BellSouth’s wireline broadband Internet access service based on its source, ownership or destination.”
This is a strong but not extreme form of a basic Network Neutrality rule (it has similarities to a bill proposed by Senator Olympia Snowe last year). This rule effectively bars discrimination against bits on the network on the basis of source, ownership, or destination. It forbids AT&T from, for example, selling Yahoo or CNN priority access to its customers over its broadband networks, and favoring those content sources over unaffiliated blogs or search engines.
But the rule does not ban all forms of discrimination. The agreement takes the position that (like cholesterol) not all forms of differential treatment are bad. Interestingly, the agreement does not prevent AT&T from treating different media carried on the Internet differently, so long as the carrier does not discriminate between who is providing the content. AT&T, under this agreement, may speed all the Internet video traffic on its network (to compete, for example, with cable). But it cannot pick and choose whose video traffic to speed up. In short, AT&T must treat like traffic alike–that is the essence of the agreement.
