The issue of the Internet's neutrality, a.k.a. net neutrality, was back in the headlines last month, as a result of a proposal developed by Google and Verizon, as Denise Bedell covered in this post. Net neutrality basically means that Internet service providers treat all traffic - from e-commerce orders to spam to emails from your college buddies - the same.

Net neutrality proponents say that's as it should be; that no organization should decide what traffic deserves priority and gets to travel more quickly through the ether. Service providers, on the other hand, say they need some way to manage their networks, lest bandwidth-hogging videos, for instance, crowd out other types of traffic.

Without net neutrality there would be no Facebook, no YouTube, no internet 
giants that started in the dorm room of a couple of college kids.

Okay I take that back. Some of the ingenious and daring internet ideas that have changed the world as we know it would still exist, and possibly in the form that we now know. But quite possibly not.