The idea that the net is and should remain an open, fair platform where packets flow freely and web services just work, everywhere and without favoritism. And they're trying to find the best way to guarantee that.
The problem is hardly new. ICANN, the little-understood, policy- setting body that's in charge of the net's address system, has grappled with it, mostly successfully, for years. Now the agency -- and its energetic new leader, Rod Beckstrom -- is gearing up for some of its biggest challenges yet, as new powers such as China come online in force, and the U.S. cedes some of its historical control.
“Some governments seem to think that ICANN should be engaged in regulating what kind of content is on the net," said David Johnson, a senior fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “The whole point of ICANN was to keep the domain name system from being used in that way."
Net neutrality is most commonly framed in terms of a commercial threat from service providers hoping to profit by privileging certain services and content over others. But an equal, if less discussed, neutrality problem is quickly rising to the fore in the form of governments seeking to control information inside their borders.
ICANN's most epic battle started in 2003, when Verisign, which has the ICANN contract to run the business of selling and administering .com and .net, decided it would re-route users who typed in non-existent .com domain names to a search engine page with ads. The move was rightly criticized as a security threat and a violation of net protocols, and ICANN ordered Verisign to remove the “feature," though Verisign later filed a federal lawsuit over it.
That battle cemented ICANN's role as the defender of the net's inner architecture from self-serving mega-corporations. Now, the group's biggest challenge is trying to keep the internet, and all the countries that connect to it, united.
That responsibility now rests on the shoulders of Beckstrom.
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