2007-01-21 Net Neutrality

I was following a little bit the long discussion about net neutrality and found this quote from Tim Berners-Lee about net neutrality :

Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf,
or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or 
their government, or their hardware vendor.

This quote summarizes really well what net neutrality is. There are a lot of discussion saying that this is not a problem when an ISP provides a differentiation regarding the services you access on the Internet. I think it is. The ISP has the role to provide you an access to a public network nothing more or… less. We don't want to get back to the old ages where there were Compuserve, a fidonet network, MSN and sometimes a wacky gateway to the Internet from those proprietary networks. We just want plain routed IP packet on the Internet…

Update 2007-01-23 : I'm not against traffic engineering in the ISP backbone. I'm just against the idea to have different kind of access depending of the agreement of the ISP made with various service provider. Imagine that you have your ISP giving you a fast access to live.com server engine but not to the google search engine. It's not a matter of law (Net Neutrality will not be solved by the legal framework), it's just a matter to keep the access to a public network. At the end, we must keep a free market when providing access to the public Internet.