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Choosing sides on net neutrality
The knotty issue of net neutrality"the principle that network providers should not discriminate in the sites or applications they provide access to"and its implications for libraries was deftly explicated by a panel of experts assembled Sunday morning by the Library Information and Technology Association.
Clifford Lynch, director of the Coalition for Networked Information, opened by framing the issue in a historical context, suggesting that "While net neutrality is a relatively new phrase""arising within the past 10 years""at some level it's a very old idea." In the mid-1990s, when the Internet was beginning to be used by a wider audience, numerous competing services offered different types of access and widely varying pricing structure, which Lynch called "an enormous competitive market with low barriers to entry."