Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is a term that refers to ISPs maintaining an even playing field when providing internet service to would be competitors. There are currently efforts underway by large ISPs to provide a higher tier of service for those companies with the ability to pay.

The fear is that powerhouses like Amazon and YouTube can pay to make navigation within their websites faster and therefore more convenient. Furthermore, ISPs can make certain content inaccesible, eliminating one of the internet's most appealing features, the fact that wherever you access from you can access the same content.
　
"Thou shalt not discriminate among bits based on who made them or what they're doing"
is the 11th commandment for proponents of net neutrality. Though this seems like a new high tech problem that could only be realized in the 21st century, I found some examples almost 150 years old that would suggest otherwise. In 1860 a US federal law was passed regarding the subsidization of telegraph lines which stated that:

"messages received from any individual, company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of their reception, excepting that the dispatches of the government shall have priority ..."

—An act to facilitate communication between the Atlantic and Pacific states by electric telegraph, June 16, 1860

Just as there was an awareness of the potential abuse of the system, there were also opportunists who attempted to circumvent these types of regulations. In 1888, Almon Brown Strowger invented an automated telephone exchange system designed to bypass non-neutral telephone operators who redirected calls for profit.

Ultimately the solution to this issue will determine how the internet evolves. If neutrality is not maintained, the internet could lose its dynamic nature and end up analagous to our cookie cutter suburbs, homogenous, predictable, and worst of all, boring.