I also find myself concerned about the geopolitical implications of making telecommuting more difficult: With depressed oil stocks, is now the best time to be throwing into question whether the network will be there for telecommuters to operate? Furthermore, won't regions that have free and neutral broadband have a significant advantage over those suffer the yoke of isolation?

We can do better than what Internet isolationism suggests. In fact, we have done better. Network neutrality has been the "secret sauce" behind a decade of business transformation. The simple fact that negotiations between two businesses can be conducted over e-mail, without any special networking arrangements made beforehand, is impossible without net neutrality. Broadband providers that suggest we abandon this massively successful status quo in return for a radical philosophical departure that has failed everywhere else its been tried, do so at not just their peril, but at ours.

Dan Kaminsky is a security researcher who's been presenting research into interesting mechanisms within TCP/IP for several years. He spent two years at Cisco Systems Inc. and two more as a senior security consultant at Avaya Inc., before starting consulting under his own DoxPara Research brand. He is best known for his work accurately estimating and visualizing the number of hosts infected by Sony Corp.'s DRM rootkit, using a quirk of the Internet's Domain Name System infrastructure. Kaminsky has also done extensive work with high-speed network analysis, data tunnelling across inclement networks, and shortcomings in the MD5 hashing algorithm. He is based in Seattle.