Abstract
As Broadband gets pervasive and popular, Internet has become the most successful and important communications media in history. At the same time, the emergence of broadband also brings a dilemma for telecommunications regulatory policy. Regulators find it difficult to prevent broadband operators leverage their monopoly power to hinder innovation and competition in adjacent application and content market and to promote broadband infrastructure investments. The special broadband market environment and telecommunications regulatory regime in U.S. make the problem much more complicated, so the debate on “Network Neutrality” arises. “Network neutrality urges ex ante regulatory regime and demands broadband operators with transmission facilities should not discriminate against any applications and service providers. Network neutrality is a highly U.S.-centric issue in the origin, but as Internet is cross-border, the debate also allures great attentions internationally. So in this article, the author tries to collect related literatures in the recent years as much as possible and introduce the origin, philosophy and legislative drafts on network neutrality proposal. Then the author analyzes network neutrality debate that bases on network technology, broadband competition, economic theory and legal perspectives, and make comparisons with other proposals that tackle the broadband regulatory dilemma. Finally, the author doubts the necessity of network neutrality regulation and claims it is not a best solution for solving broadband regulatory dilemma and not much likely becoming international regulatory issues.