AT+T made a decision two days ago with some substantial implications. In the following
communication between AT+T and the FCC (PDF), AT+T clearly voiced a commitment to support
Net neutrality for no less than two years from the date of the communication.
If you're not familiar with Net neutrality, here's the two sentence version. Net neutrality according to Tim Wu (in the Wikipedia link posted above) is a "maximally useful public information network [that] aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally." ISPs stand to gain from a lack of Net neutrality, as they would be able to set up payment structures that give paying Net content suppliers (Web site owners) preferential treatment within ISP networks. So, for instance, if Amazon were to pay Comcast a fee of some sort, Comcast customers would connect to Amazon more quickly and would download content faster.
Use your imagination to see where how the domino effect might hurt Web developers, Web hosts and the Internet public.
I've done the reading for you. If you open that PDF I linked above and scroll down to page nine, you'll see AT+T was kind enough to discuss this topic directly.
Speaking of Tim Wu, here's his analysis of the whole situation.
Thank you AT+T for making such a bold, direct statement that supports the best interests of the public.
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It seems not everyone is 100% pleased with AT&T's concessions.
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/12/trojan_horse_2.h...
Tom Evslin, who at one point ran AT&T Worldnet, says AT&T's net neutrality definition applies only to the Internet access network, not the backbone. In addition, AT&T excluded IPTV from its agreement. While Tim Wu says IPTV "does not rely on the public Internet as described by IP addresses", Tom says there are no separate pipes on an IP network.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061229/001833.s...
Techdirt says AT&T has always planned to use the IPTV network as that high-speed toll lane it wants Google, Vonage and others to pay extra for. Also, AT&T isn't even set up to put quality of service on their existing network, so the agreement not to violate network neutrality on its Internet access network is not very meaningful.
I guess we have 2 years to see how committed AT&T is to the "best interests of the public", as you put it. After that - assuming Congress hasn't pass a net neutrality legislation - it's all fair game.
As you say, in the end, we can only wait and see what they will do.