How should we charge for Internet access? Recent discussion has focused on the idea forwarded by some US ISPs of charging content providers for 'premium' access to the network. If Google paid BellSouth for premium access, their packets would get priority over Yahoo or MSN, for instance, under this plan.
The response has been an outcry in favor of the "democratic net," which supposedly refers to what we have now, where all packets are neutral in terms of network priority. The neutrality of packets makes for some interesting Computer Science Geek discussions, but in practical terms, it's not the whole answer either.
Neither of these approaches address the real issue that will, ultimately, confront the Internet: end consumers aren't paying actual rates based on their usage. Bandwidth alone is only half of the cost. Distance matters, too. If I download a 50 MB file from my neighbor who is on the same ISP as me, that uses a certain amount of resources. If I were to download that same file from my friend in Japan, it's going to use a lot more resources -- the resources of several companies along the way.
We've seen steps to minimize this in caching systems employed by various ISPs and the mirroring system many popular download sites use to encourage people to grab files from closer sources. But these are voluntary efforts, not associated with the economic hammer.
The most fundamental shift that will hit the Internet is when pricing changes to reflect actual consumption of resources.
That what I think, anyway. So I'm not worried about the present discussion over packet neutralty and priority. And you shouldn't be either. Implementing that would just lead very quickly to the proper bandwith-distance pricing model that will make the Internet more stable overall.