Inside Obama and McCain's Conflicting Takes on Net Neutrality

[Commentary] According to their position statements on the issues, Sen John McCain (R-AZ) is against Network Neutrality and Sen Barack Obama (D-IL) is for it. This makes it one of the few technology issues on which the candidates clearly disagree. McCain believes in a lightly regulated Internet, while Obama believes in more government involvement. But it gets a bit more complicated. When it comes to net neutrality, both sides can make a credible case that they're the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication. One reason is that there's no accepted definition of network neutrality itself. It is, in fact, more of a networking philosophy than a defined political position. A pure "neutral" network is one that would treat all content that traveled across it equally. No one data packet would be prioritized above another. Image files, audio files, a request from a consumer for a web page -- all would be blindly routed from one location to another, and the network would neither know nor care what kind of data was encompassed in each packet. For most but not all kinds of files, that's how it works now. When they were created, TCP/IP protocols were not intended to discriminate routinely between packets of data. The idea was to maintain a "best effort" network, one that moved packets from place to place in an effort to maximize overall throughput. But the protocols did allow for discrimination when it was needed. "Even the very first design for IP, back in 1980, had a "type of service" field, intended to provide different levels of traffic priority in a military setting," says John Wroclawski, the director of the computer networks division at the University of Southern California's revered Information Sciences Institute. "The big question is not 'can you do this technically,'" Wroclawski says. "It's 'how do you decide who to favor?'" In today's multimedia-saturated Internet, streams of time-sensitive voice and video data are routinely prioritized over nonsequential data transfers such as Web pages. If one bit doesn't follow another in a videoconference, for instance, the stream falls apart. For the most part, even proponents of net neutrality are okay with that level of discrimination. The real controversy arises in the "last mile," where Internet service providers (ISPs) serve as the conduit between the public Internet and customers' homes. At this point, data cannot be rerouted along a different path in response to excessive traffic. So, predictably, the biggest opponents of net neutrality are ISPs, particularly the cable Internet providers such as Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, etc.