The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has started hearings today on the Net Neutrality - an issue that could have a huge impact on how services and content are delivered over the Web. At the heart of the controversy is whether carriers can introduce tollgates, prioritize traffic and/or set aside parts of their networks for their own services/content. The carriers contend they made the investments to create these networks so they should have the ability to charge companies who want to travel over it. Net Neutrality proponents argue the Internet has flourished because of the free flow of information over the past 40 years. They believe innovation and economic development would suffer if Net Neutrality is allowed to be shoved aside. The most eloquent - and perhaps the most effective - argument in favour of Net Neutrality comes from Vinton Cerf, one of the key players in the Internet's development. Here is an excerpt of his presentation day:
"Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success. For the foreseeable future most Americans will face little choice among broadband carriers. Enshrining a rule that permits carriers to
discriminate in favor of certain kinds or sources of services would place those carriers in control of online activity. Allowing broadband carriers to reserve huge amounts of bandwidth for their own services will not give consumers the broadband Internet our country and economy need. Promoting an
open and accessible Internet is critical for consumers. It is also critical to our nation’s competitiveness – in places like Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, higher-bandwidth and neutral broadband platforms are unleashing waves of innovation that threaten to leave the U.S. further and
further behind."
For some other posts that I've done recently on Net Neutrality, click here, here and here. Here's a feature story I wrote for the National Post in December. Daniel Berninger has a good op-ed piece on Om Malik's blog.
Update: The Washington Post (hat tip to Silicon Valley This Morning) had this juicy quote from John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel: "The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers. It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers." Guess you know where Verizon stands on the issue!?

FeedBurner, which is establishing itself as the RSS management leader, has raised some more private equity by bringing on Union Square Ventures. No financial terms but FeedBurner said total fund raising is now more than $10-million - it appears Union Square was brought on as a strategic investor since FeedBurner may have not needed the cash. FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo said the company is now delivering 10 million subscriptions and 200,000 feeds a day. A growing part of the growth, he said, is coming from corporate publishers such as USA Today and Reuters who have realized RSS is not a short-lived trend but another way to distribute content.