On September 21, 2009, The US Federal Communications Commission chairman, Julius Genachowski, gave a speech in which he outlined two new principles to augment the “Four Freedoms” originally articulated in 2004 by then chairman Michael Powell. The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination — stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications. An implicit assumption is present in this principle (and in the speech as a whole) that discrimination is a bad thing.

Discrimination is technically a neutral term. One of the definitions given by Merriam-Webster is “the process by which two stimuli differing in some aspect are responded to differently”.

However, over the years discrimination has become synonymous with prejudice, and it is in this light that the network neutrality debate has focused. However, differentiating one thing does not have to come at the expense of another. Differentiation can be a means of reducing waste and increasing efficiency. Consider the case of a nation in south-east Asia. Assume a popular networked video game console is launched, and that all of the gaming servers are located in Redmond, Washington, USA. Assume that the nation has 2 primary means of reaching the west coast of the US: one that goes east to west, and one west to east. Based on distance alone, the east to west underwater cable will have the lowest latency. But, the overland west to east cable will also have many more routing exchanges, which add even more latency (as much as 1-2ms per exchange).

In this environment, if the ISP were to route gaming traffic destined to Redmond via the short cable, and email traffic via the long cable, there would be an advantage given to the gaming traffic, and no disadvantage to the email traffic. Thus differentiation does not need to come at the expense of anything. This network is more efficient, and all users would achieve a better experience using it.

Is it the intent of the new fifth principle to disallow such activity? The explicit wording would appear to do so. But that goes against the spirit of innovation and relentless search for efficiency that has been the core of the Internet culture.