It is a concern of an awful lot of people and now a consultation has been launched by the European commission.
The consultation was announced by the Vice-President for the DIgitial Agenda, Neelie Kroes and it is intended to allow all interested parties a chance to get their voices heard. The consultation is hoping to hear from all sides of the debate – consumers, content providers, business and academia.
One of the core issues is the increasing practice of how Internet Service providers manage their traffic. In order to keep the internet neutral then traffic management will be vital. High speed connections throughout most European countries are driving the advancement of different technologies from IPTV, Internet phone calls through VOIP and numerous other functions being driven by some of the worlds most popular websites like BBC IPlayer.
There are obviously concerns that any major traffic shaping conducted by the service providers could affect the development of certain technologies and also the neutrality of the internet to people, services and applications.
There is a general agreement that some sort of definition and standard should be set to maintain the neutrality of the internet and this is perhaps the main driver for this consultation and subsequent debate.
Many groups are also concerned with the potential liberty and privacy issues that could be affected if ISPs allows certain applications or services to run faster than others. Many providers already throttle certain applications like P2P protocols from specific groups or IP addresses. This could easily be expanded under pressure for example big media companies wanting to curb such protocols suspected of distributing pirated and copyrighted material.
Already some countries have throttled and blocked access to applications and services which allow http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/ecomm/library/public_consult/index_en.htm