Basically this issue known as Net Neutrality, wants to keep the Internet similar to the way telephones have worked for the last 50 years. In the simplest terms, you pay for a connection, you can call whoever, wherever you want. Verizon, can't prevent you from calling AT&T customers or South Dakota. Now imagine Comcast degrading or even blocking service to sites like Google because Yahoo has cut a deal with Comcast as the preferred search engine with Mafia like protection money.

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said the new rules would mean providers "cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks, or pick winners by favoring some content or applications over others in the connection to subscribers' homes. Nor can they disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider. The Internet must continue to allow users to decide what content and applications succeed."

The Internet has been home to so much innovation and entrepreneurship because of a key architecture decision at its inception. The net functions on edge-to-edge design. The “stuff” that goes over the wires and connection all look the same. The start and end points of the connection do the interpreting and translating. This allows infrastructure to mostly remain upgrade free, it’s not specialized to handle images and graphics but then the following year video is introduced to the internet and everything needs to be upgraded because it was originally never designed to do it. Instead, you only upgrade the pieces on the end. Usually it only takes a new piece of software to interpret what’s coming over the connection. This design is much easier to manage.

Instead, service providers would like to analyze content going over the connection and manage it. It denies predictable rules of the road to all players involved with the Internet.

Opposition to these rules comes mostly from service providers who claim that this may cause flat-rate Internet service plans to disappear and change to usage and data consumption based plans. They also oppose government involvement in private business and would in fact stifle innovation.

For more information visit: http://www.savetheinternet.com/