The design of the Internet was meant to put no intelligence in the network, and to distribute it to the extremities. Therefore, the Internet network processes any IP packet in a purely equal manner. So far, the focus on bandwidth is on the last mile, because of the slowness of ADSL, and its asymmetry. Its backbones, owing to the Internet bubble investments, and the availability of Content Delivery Network (CDN), are not saturated. Then, came the debate about network neutrality. The telecommunication providers, who were looking for ways to increase their revenues without impacting on end user bills, thought about introducing classes of services in their routers, thereby asking content or service providers to pay for privileged services. As Tim Wu explained it, amongst all impacts, it could lead to stop the innovation that created the Internet. All pure Internet players complained, and, so far, the debate is still open. Now, Governments start embracing a very innovative approach to the Internet, such as Opendata, Government 2.0, Government as a platform. Therefore, one can imagine in the near future that they will develop a whole range of truly useful services. Will such Governments accept the “best effort” traditional philosophy of the Internet, or will they require some sort of reserved bandwidth inside the network? Let us make two scenarios. The first one is tele-medicine. A very important remotely performed clinical operation requires specific high broadband end-to-end communication. If the network is congested, because, as an example, people are downloading movies, leading to a failure in the remote operation, how would the public react to this ? The second one is an emergency situation, say earthquake, bushfire, flood, etc. In two major crises, namely 9/11, and the Haiti earthquake, the Internet proved its resistance to stress, by being the only alive communication network. So, it may well happen that, in case of a crisis, emergency services require that the network is devoted entirely to its management, and I don’t see any counter reason to do so. In both cases, it would imply introducing classes of services in the network. And, if this is done, I can hardly imagine the telecommunication operators not using those classes of services in other, more commercial, contexts. How to solve the issue while keeping the Internet neutral? I see two solutions. The first one is to say that Government creates a specific network for its own services. This would be highly costly, and totally counter productive. The second one would be to insure a high availability network whatever the situation, something that would lead to an under used network in normal time. This is the case as of now, but what happens to the backbones when fibre-to-the-home is, at last, available everywhere? CDN is not a solution, as it is of no use for a synchronous peer to peer communication. I sometimes wonder if keeping the network always neutral is feasible, or if it is utopia. Now that the Internet is an essential service widely used, shall we be able to continue the spirit of its inventors, something like “a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site”. Read more at blog.hyperdoxe.net