Net Neutrality In Other Words.

This post would have appeared as a comment on Danah's blog in response to her appeal for a way to explain net neutrality to the layperson. Unfortunately, some technical glitch is preventing me from so doing and thus, I'll address it here and maybe open up the discussion.

My take on this is that the key - in best Geek Marketing 101 tradition - is to couch your explanation in non-technical terms (as when I talked of RSS as TiVo for blogs).

One can talk of digital apartheid but to me that doesn't quite capture the idea that economic power plays a crucial role in the discrimination. So, the best I can do is to describe a non-neutral net as a supermarket or museum or library in which particular sponsored aisles are wider, better lit and better stocked than others. Does that work for you?