Future of the Internet highway debated

updated 5:59 p.m. ET Feb. 26, 2006

NEW YORK - On the Internet, the traffic cops are blind — they don’t look at the data they’re directing, and they don’t give preferential treatment.

That’s something operators of the Internet highway, the major U.S. phone companies, want to change by effectively adding a toll lane: They want to be able to give priority treatment to those who pay to get through faster.

Naturally, consumer advocates and the Web companies that would be paying the toll are calling it highway robbery.

“Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success,” Vinton Cerf told a Senate committee recently. Cerf, who played a key role in building the Internet, is now the “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google Inc.

On the Internet, information is carried in “packets,” small chunks of data. An e-mail might be divided into several packets and travel different routes to the destination, much like cars have multiple ways of getting somewhere. The packets may arrive out of order, a few even late, but data can be reassembled to reconstitute the e-mail.

This design grew out of the military’s desire for a network that was both simple and reliable. And as the Internet became more widely available, this equal treatment of traffic was part of what made it attractive; individuals, startups and big corporations were on the same footing.

Now, however, the Internet is being used for things the engineers of the 1960s and 70s couldn’t have envisioned, like video, telephone calls and Internet games.

It doesn’t matter if an e-mail gets where it’s going half a second late, but a half-second’s delay in a phone call is annoying, and a half-second’s delay in a fast-moving game can mean a missed shot.

Thus, the telecommunications companies want to be able to provide “tiered service,” guaranteeing that, for a price, some packets will get to their destination on time.

The carriers are under “tremendous pressure” from customers to provide more reliable service, said Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks the performance of Web sites and the Internet.

Brief delays, for instance, could result in stuttering video, unacceptable to advertisers, White notes.

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