Network Neutrality: History, Regulation and Future

Abstract

This article focuses on the global policy challenge of network neutrality. Will governments be able to ensure increasing access to an ever faster Internet while supporting user and content provider expectations that censorship and filtering of their content is kept to a democratically and economically necessary minimum? Or will open Internet access be relegated to a comparatively slow lane, with fast lanes reserved for ISPs' affiliated video,  telephony  and other preferred services? Communications regulation of telephony, broadcasting and the Internet (including consumer electronic commerce) depends on the solutions found to these questions, grouped in the sloganised principle of ‘network neutrality'.