It’s with great ease that we take the Internet for granted in this day and age. The fact that we can access any site we wish at any given point is the sign of a working democracy in action. Granted the web doesn’t always offer the most savoury content to the end user but it has allowed the individual a seemingly endless means to chronicle their lives and experiences and demonstrate a level of creativity that could have quite easily gone unnoticed at other points in history. Of course the web isn’t just about levels of personal expression, the last decade has seen the Internet become a prevailing exponent for business. Its commercial potential has already been realised while in relative terms it remains in its infancy.

It could be argued that one of the reasons the Internet has become such a universally successful phenomenon is because it has always maintained such a level playing field. However that could all be about to change. The phrase “net neutrality” might not be one that the average user is familiar with in the UK but rest assured of late it has become something of a hot potato in the United States.

Up until now the Internet has maintained a democratic stance for more or less everyone involved. It has evolved largely through a process of self regulation that has led to a natural state of evolution. However recently there has been activity in American congress that has looked at how some of the larger telecommunications suppliers have viewed these issues.

Net neutrality is for want of a better term “a safety net” for the web, proponents are concerned that some of the telecommunications giants are proposing one version of the web for those who can pay while a lesser version for those who can’t. At present all Internet traffic travels on an equal footing, search engines rank sites dependant on how they are accessed or through their Meta tags (which provides data on how to categorise a web page and how it should be listed). Yet if we truly enter an era of non neutrality then this could be altered dependant on how much you are prepared to pay.

The ramifications are pretty obvious. Imagine a large media corporation with plenty of cash at its disposal versus a site of much smaller proportions. The former site would find itself on the “good internet” while the potential cost issues could price the smaller site out of the equation. With the big boys playing in the “fast lane” the traffic to their site could quite easily be prioritised, their placing on a search engine could be boosted courtesy of a fiscal transaction. As a result the smaller site finds itself left out in the cold.

That’s the trouble with a fast lane, there has to be a slow one.

On a larger scale the potential problems that an absence of neutrality could create exist in the area of technological evolution. What if someone offering a better product, a better technology was outgunned by a big spending competitor on the net. We could see a better technology fail simply because they couldn’t get a fair leverage in the market place.

It is heartening to see many of the big internet players standing as advocates of neutrality when in a new unbalanced world they could be the people to benefit from splashing out on fast tracking themselves to greater profit. So far the advocates include eBay, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.

Those who oppose neutrality include the likes Bell Communication and AT&T as well as other large US cable companies. Of course one of their primary arguments against neutrality is the fact that the Internet is now a potentially dangerous environment for children. There is some truth to this argument but it has also been argued that despite profits in excess of fifteen billion dollars in one quarter they have done precious little to block or filter any inappropriate content to their customer base.

Unfortunately for the backers of net neutrality their efforts to have an amendment passed into law were unsuccessful striking quite a blow for the neutrality camp. The issue now moves into the senate where an additional vote will be made later this month.

But where does the UK stand on issues of net neutrality. Well here the net providers are regulated in the same way as our telephone providers (in the sense that for the majority of us our connections are provided on the same lines we get our landline phones).

You might think this is purely an American issue, the truth is this is an internet issue, and the fact that you’ve read this far means at some point in the future these changes might just affect you.