Hello and today is Monday January 22nd.

The net neutrality fight, quiet for some time has been raging again.

Last week, a bipartisan team headed by Senators Byron Dorgan and Olympia Snow introduced a new bill that would ban network providers from prioritizing network traffic.

Tom Firey, Cato's managing editor of Regulation magazine, who's been keeping tabs on the debate, helps

us sort out the details.

The Net Neutrality Fight.

It's pretty fair to say that the subject confuses most people. So what is it about?

What it's really about is the actual roadway, the actual information superhighway and who's going to pay

for it. We're becoming more and more of an internet using society and even more importantly the way

we're using it is requiring lots more data to fly back and forth.

Think about YouTube and all the videos that they're now pumping out there.

Think of ESPN showing all the sports

highlights. Think about Cato Daily Podcasts, putting our stuff out there. We're using more and more of the

internet for each of these applications. Well the internet, like any other highway has only so much

room before you have to start adding more lanes or in this case adding more fiber or

fiber optics. Up to now it hasn't been that much of a problem because a lot of the tech bubble was about putting

fiber optics in and allowing information to fly back and forth.

And it ended up we put in more than what we needed.

So up to now we've just been filling up

blank space. But now it's getting clogged, it's getting filled up. So either

internet companies have to start putting in more fiber optics at significant expense

or else somebody else does.

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