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We have had serious problems with the neutrality of the net since the beginning.
How do you access the world wide web?
Most of use through Google or some other search engine.
How much of the net do they actually spider and allow access to? 11%.
What sites show up in the top end of search results? Those who can afford to pay for a search engine optimization program.
Who gets to publish on the internet? Not the individual. Most cable internet service providers block port 80. This is the port that web sites are served on. What this means is that I can not run a web server from my home computer and "broadcast" my information on to the net in a way that people can easily find it. I would have to pay for hosting. If I want to serve rich media content like youtube, then I have to pay very expensive server and bandwidth fees. This means that publishing on the net is increasing tilted towards those who can afford to publish. This in turn limits the voice and content of the net to information and content that is marketable or assumes a profit. We don't notice the disparity now because a blog looks very similar to Salon.com. Text, images, users. The future holds much richer media types like video, and also much more complex application layers to the sites. In a short time, the published content on the net will heavily skew to the big players who can afford the bandwidth, the servers, the development costs, corporate attorneys, and the search engine optimization programs. Add content packet delivery tolls on top and "we the people" definitely don't have equality in net access and publishing rights.
