Since I blogged about net neutrality back in March, it has become a hot issue, with lots of supporters - including even Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web - opposing the telecom industry.

Net neutrality means that you can surf the internet without internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast requiring sites to pay a fee to make their sites download quickly.

Proponents of net neutrality see the telecom industry as gatekeepers. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) writes

Instead of continuing our freedom to use those connections with whatever content, devices and services we want, some corporations want to control what we access over the Internet. This would include giving better connections to their favored content and charging money for that privilege.

What would the world look like if the Internet had been controlled in this way a few years ago? Imagine if the students who created Google or Yahoo had been charged a fee by a phone company for the privilege of letting their potential users have fast access. These small projects would not have turned into big ideas that revolutionized the World Wide Web.

ZDNET.com columnist, John Carroll, counters

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Broadband providers, most notably AT&T, aren’t suggesting that they will “control what we access over the Internet.” Rather, they are saying that some content may be given “fast track” access into the home, access to which is contingent on a fee paid either by the provider of content or the consumer.

To consider why this might be useful, imagine 5-10 years down the road when the average size of the datapipe into the home is in the 25-50 megabit range (placing us still behind the South Koreans, but oh well). VoIP service might start to get enhanced by video that is not just the simple 320 by 240 image we are used to in the IM world, but in the Standard Definition, or even the High Definition range.

Given the time criticality of such data, not to mention the fact that such usage will vastly outweigh, from a network load standpoint, the simple text and image traffic that constitutes a large percentage of the current Internet, a fast track might not be just useful, but fair to boot. We charge ten ton trucks more for access to a toll road than standard-sized automobiles because of the extra wear and tear they cause on these roads. Why shouldn’t we make “bandwidth hogs” pay more?

Most bloggers see net neutrality from Lofgren’s perspective, as a threat to shut out the little guys at the expense of the 500 lb gorillas, and the blogosphere has been buzzing for the last few months. SaveTheInternet.com has collected over 750,000 signatures of supporters.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t have doubts - Boing Boing writer, Cory Doctorow supports net neutrality but

I remain skeptical of the idea that this is a problem with a regulatory solution. The FCC is slow, often captured, and breathtakingly dumb about technology (this is the agency that passed the initial Broadcast Flag rule, after all). Asking them to write a set of rules describing “neutrality” and then enforce them seems like a recipe for trouble to me.

For example, say that your university maintained a pool of DSL lines for students, and a data-center for courseware, and created dedicated connections between them — is that “neutral?” What about Akamai: they put servers in ISPs’ NOCs around the world, and then sell mirror-space on those servers to people who want optimized delivery to those ISPs’ customers. Is that “neutral?” How will you tell, from the outside, whether an ISP is delivering slow packets to you because it’s “non-neutral” as opposed to badly managed, overloaded, or staggering from some kind of net-quake?

Regardless, it looks like the net neutralists have won a victory. Last week, a bipartisan bill favoring net neutrality and sponsored by James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, won a 20-13 vote in the House Judiciary Committee. It will soon be put to a full vote on the House floor.