Objectives of knowledge management

Internet governance
Control of the operation 
and use of the Internet.
Internet governance
Focus on
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Chapter 3
Managing digital business infrastructure
The net neutrality principle
Net (or network) neutrality
is based on the organic way in which the Internet grew during 
the 1980s and 1990s. The principle enshrines equal access to the Internet and the web which 
is threatened by two different forces. First, and the most common context for net neutral-
ity, is the desire by some telecommunications companies and ISPs to offer tiered access to 
particular Internet services. The wish of the ISPs is to potentially offer a different quality of 
service, i.e. speed, to consumers based on the fee paid by the upstream content provider. So 
potentially ISPs could charge companies such as TV channels more because they stream con-
tent such as video content which has high bandwidth requirements.
Concerns over tiered access to services appear strongest in the United States where two 
proposed Bills to help achieve neutrality, the 2006 Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination 
Act and the 2006 Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act, did not 
become law. The ISPs were strong lobbyists against these Bills and subsequently it has been 
alleged that provider Comcast has discriminated against users accessing peer-to-peer traffic 
from BitTorrent (
ArsTechnica
, 2007). In European countries such as the UK, ISPs offer dif-
ferent levels of access at different bandwidths.
The second and less widely applied, but equally concerning, concept of net neutrality is 
the wish by some governments or other bodies to block access to certain services or content. 
For example, the government in China limits access to certain types of content in what has 
been glibly called ‘
The Great Firewall of China
’ (
Wired
, 2007), which describes the develop-
ment of the Golden Shield which is intended to monitor, filter and block sensitive online 
content. More recently Google has been criticised for censoring its search results in China for 
certain terms such as ‘Tiananmen Square’. In 2009/2010 Google considered withdrawing its 
business from China.
Net neutrality
The principle of provision 
of equal access to 
different Internet services 
by telecommunications 
service providers.
Box 3.8
Ofcom on net neutrality in Europe and the United States
Ofcom is the regulator of the Internet in the UK. Its position on net neutrality has a clear 
description of the potential need for governance on this issue.