The days of dial-up are practically over. Take a listen: the atmosphere is relieved to be empty of the digital twittering from modems connecting at a paltry 56kbps. Today’s Internet is built for speed, and the stuttering page-loading is gone. Sites like [1] YouTube and [2] Pandora demand to pump packets through ISPs’ tubes at the speed of a click.

And then there’s the trendy interactive Web: Web 2.0. This includes sites like[3] Facebook, [4] Flikr and some more radical ideas like [5] YouOS, an online operating system. The idea is putting the user in control; it’s spreading its roots all over the place, generating some of the most popular content ever. And all this comes only at the cost of about $50 a month.

Backers of net competition say this is not the case. In the outstanding and unresolved Internet technology (IT) debate over “net neutrality,” companies such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast propose that there are indeed bigger costs to today’s Internet, and they’re tired of paying for it. The digital world has evolved beyond the scope of its original concepts. Is it time for the physical world to catch up?

“Frankly, the issue began in 2006, when it became permanent at the grassroots level,” said Mike McCurry, the former Clinton Administration press secretary who now lobbies for [6] Hands Off the Internet, a coalition of major networks that wants to stave off the impending NN regulations. “There are two sides to this story; we’d better get out and tell the other side.”

Between parties there can be a bit of packet loss regarding what net neutrality really is, but an IT research firm, the Burton Group, has an ostensibly innocuous definition (It is, of course, the implications of the definition which lead to trouble). Net neutrality, it says, is ensuring that all packets (Internet data) are treated the same, and users’ access must be treated just as equally. Alice can watch videos on YouTube with the same service capabilities Bob has when he calls his mother using VoIP (Internet telephone). Service is not conditional upon either of these.

Backers of net competition say that this is quite feasible without loading up on federal regulations. For some on this side of the fence, there’s already a lack of equal user access. When picking an Internet service provider (ISP), users must inherently choose how much of a wallop they want from their Internet. Those who go for dial-up naturally aren’t going to get the same access as someone using cable, and cable can’t match the speed of those using fiber optics. People pay for the kind of access they want. If they want their speeds to be capped less, they pay more.

This argument then carries over to content providers such as [7] Google. People using YouTube necessarily need more bandwidth than someone viewing a simple HTML page. The Fiber to the Home Council stated that “downloading a high-definition video takes more bandwidth than viewing 35,000 Web pages.” And viewing a 10-minute video takes up much less time than viewing those 35,000 pages. McCurry stated that the Internet is “very fragile,” revealing that “YouTube carries the same amount traffic now that the entire Internet had in 2000. It needs to be updated.”

So the data getting through is dense in the sense of data per second. Think of highway tolls, and imagine a tractor-trailer’s costs for highway use versus a car’s. Here are three scenarios: the truck can unfairly pay the same, small amount a little car would; the car can unfairly pay the same, large amount the truck would; or the price can be regulated and geared toward the appropriate vehicle. If a company wants to use bigger vehicles that cause more wear and tear, then they agree to pay the extra money. Doesn’t this make sense with data flow as well?

Then there are applications which aren’t directly part of the Internet itself and mainly use it for transfer purposes. Video game consoles use the Internet to bring gamers from all around the world to their TVs. Devices such as Slingbox can deliver TV from a home connection to a computer used when the buyer isn’t home. Many new TVs and media-consumption devices have taken away the intermediary steps of putting data on a storage device for viewing–now they just hook up directly to the Internet. All these things take a higher and higher toll on the Internet’s capacity. Don’t forget to count all the traffic from regular users, computer gamers, iTunes media streaming, BitTorrent …

The little play and go buttons are so deceiving. It doesn’t matter if a download is 10 megabytes or 10 gigabytes. All it takes to start it is the motion of a little piece of plastic going down then up. A little later there’s an entire CD, an episode of “Heroes” or an operating system ready to be deployed and installed. Barely visible is the Internet’s capacity to do all this.

According to a Chicago Times article, however, that capacity is reaching its limits. The cause: high demand for network-demanding services (mostly video). The problem is Internet infrastructure. While it is dynamic and able to recover from events such as the massive hacker-attacks in February 2007 (which most users didn’t even notice), it can’t do that for the rest of its existence. Nor can it continue to hold the massive, growing flow of data as applications and services become more dynamic themselves. It needs to be upgraded with better connections, better compression and better servers.

This comes at a cost, though. Michael Balmoris, from ISP giant AT&T, said that “Internet traffic went from 1.5 million gigabytes per month in 1996 to 700 million gigabytes per month in 2006.” With a highway analogy in hand, net compeition says that the charge will go (mostly) to those who want to deliver the better content–the truck-driving Googles and Microsofts. Otherwise, those on the receiving end will be getting a bigger bill, too.

One of the biggest objections to net competition is the possibility of too much control. If an ISP can gain control over packets’ speed through its tubes, who’s to say it won’t do this to promote its own services? Take Verizon: it provides Internet, land-line phone, VoIP and some other services. If a certain ISP competes with Verizon in some way, it could conceivably just slow down Verizon VoIP packets while letting its own VoIP services work without inhibition. However, the lack of regulations net competition wants doesn’t mean it promotes illegal business practices. To put it plainly, “there need to be penalties for this,” said McCurry.

Some cases like this have already happened, such as a North Carolina ISP blocking its clients from using another company’s Web phone service. This is not what net competition supporters say they want, however.

“We support the FCC’s effort to learn the facts on this issue in its inquiry into broadband industry practices,” says Balmoris. “Real evidence presented in the record will show vast consumer benefits of decreasing broadband prices, faster broadband speeds and greater broadband deployment.”

Its biggest plea is for fairness that has generally been there all along, no matter the aspect, among those using the Internet. Whether providing a rich media experience or simply reading email and the news, there’s a price to pay for the service. Some very lucky companies took chances with the Internet. Now that their wallets have grown far beyond their popularity, perhaps the fairest thing is to take accountability and not let the great creation that is the Internet go down the tubes.