Recently, Rep. John Conyers introduced HR 5994, which is almost identical to HR 5417, the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006.

While carriers have been strong opponents to this act, Google and other over-the-top (OTT) application service providers have been strong proponents of Net neutrality.

The OTT service providers are able to take advantage of the broadband connections within IP networks without having to make the heavy investments associated with these networks. Having spent billions of dollars building and launching their own network services, telecom operators are understandably worried that OTT providers will end up capturing all the incremental user revenues, relegating the broadband network operator to a "dumb pipe" provider.

If Net neutrality is enacted into law, it will make it illegal for broadband providers to "discriminate against, or to interfere with the ability of any person to use a broadband network service to access, to use, to send, to receive, or to offer lawful content, applications or services over the Internet."

Carriers will contend that prioritization of emergency calls, or carrier-hosted VoIP calls, is occurring over the existing networks, anyway, and that it is needed due to limited bandwidth and scarce networking resources. Traffic-shaping/filtering solutions are needed, according to the carriers, for:
• Traffic analysis, shaping of bandwidth-intensive services (P2P, video and so on)
• Traffic analysis, filtering of malicious traffic on the network

Proponents of the bill fear that carriers will instead perform:
• Traffic analysis, shaping and filtering of competing OTT services (such as Skype), by determining how much users utilize these services and then degrading their experience, with artificial delays, protocol insertions to P2P applications such as BitTorrent, or other attempts

If enacted into law, enforcement is likely to be a major issue, which requires proving that specific attempts occurred by the carrier to degrade or block competing OTT services.

In the spirit of openness, perhaps what is then needed additionally is:
• Search neutrality (why is only Google Search inside Google Android?)
• Application hosting neutrality on top of the OTT service providers (why are Google applications preferred inside Google Android?)

Once it's realized how limitless and unenforceable the above is, this new legislation will likely suffer the same fate as the original one.

However, if it's passed into law, then carriers will need to take the high road and partner with the OTT application service provider (as in the case with Google's investment in the Sprint-Nextel-Clearwire partnership), or perhaps the carrier can compete with better service, bundled solutions with better pricing, better security/regulatory support, newer converged applications, and better device support with rigorously tested applications, as well as integrated zero-touch support.