I just read The Internet: The New Oil by Rich Page (a WAA member, by the way) and it mirrors the sentiment I have about Net Neutrality and I wrote about it, in fact, about a month ago while I was at SES NY and there was a session on Net Neutrality which hardly anyone attended (see Network Neutrality is for On-Line Marketers too!)

It's kinda ironic, when you think about it -  the most important session in the whole conference was one that almost no one was interested in today.  And when you think about it, it's also an issue for Web Analytics and not just search - as what we're measuring will be full of more noise, as maybe our traffic is down not just because our site design isn't working but maybe it's also down become Comcast or Verizon asked for a lot of money to provide high bandwidth.

You might say the Internet could become what the Health Care system is today - - with several tiers - you pay more you get better care, you pay less, maybe your lucky and get care or maybe you don't.

But getting back to the Oil analogy - the reason Oil is going up past 110.00 USD per barrel is due to demand for Oil from China and India going up while supply (mostly from the Middle East) is leveling off (with a lot of price gauging in between for all sorts of energy bills, even those not directly connected with Oil, such as Electricity Bills) - Paul Krugman explained this very simply in a post on Oil Numbers.

 "… world oil production has stalled — after growing around 1.6% a year in the 90s, it’s been basically flat for the last three years.

So we’ve got rapidly growing demand due to industrialization in Asia colliding with stagnant supply, basically because oil is getting hard to find. (The demand shock is probably even bigger than the GDP number suggests, because China’s economy is highly energy-inefficient).

And the demand for oil is price-inelastic — that is, it takes big price increases to persuade people to use significantly less."

With Internet Usage, that too is reaching a bottleneck with online videos and online audios clogging up Internet bandwidth which is rumored to become totally maxed out within a few years, according to ATT - ATT Warns: Internet Will Max Out Because Of Video By 2010 .

"We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010," he said. He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network. Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. "Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today," he said. The AT&T executive pointed out that the Internet exists, thanks to the infrastructure provided by a group of mostly private companies. "There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet–it is no more ethereal than the highway system. It is not created by an act of God, but upgraded and maintained by private investors," he said.

Although Cicconi's speech did not explicitly refer to the term "Net neutrality," some audience members tackled him on the issue in a question-and-answer session, asking whether the subtext of his speech was really around prioritizing some kinds of traffic. Cicconi responded by saying he believed government intervention in the Internet was fundamentally wrong.

Net Neutrality is essentially an attempt by large companies to limit Internet Usage by charging for what is now free - the problem is it creates more inequality and would probably destroy many businesses.

I don't know where this is all going to go, and I don't even know if what ATT is saying is true, or just an excuse to get Net Neutrality passed into law, but I think it's something that people at SES NY, and a lot of other places should be more interested in than they are today.

I predict that at next year's SES in New York, a lot more people will attend sessions about Net Neutrality and there will be activists groups formed, particularly of marketers who don't want to see it put in place.

On the other hand, we do have a problem with Bandwidth - mostly from what YouTube spawned with streaming Online Video - and somehow, we'll have to deal with it in one way or another, sooner or later - perhaps sooner would be better.