lity proponents acknowledge that port blocking does not represent a serious problem. 20 More recently, the focus has shifted away from the outright 20 In U.S. Senate (2006a, p. 5), Lessig calls port blocking problems "isolated." CNET News.com (2005) notes that network neutrality proponent Amazon.co acknowledged that outright block- ing of sites was not a current problem and was unlikely to become one in the future. Networks in Telecommunications blocking of access and toward the danger that network owners will give traffic bound for or received from preferred content and applications providers a higher priority or will inject latency into traffic associated with dispreferred content and applications providers. Although the FCC has yet to uncover any allegations that any network provider has pursued such practices, network neutrality proponents remain concerned that such discrimination might harm the competitiveness and innovativeness of markets for content and applications (Lessig 2002). Similarly, network neutrality proponents have expressed misgivings about what Professor Lessig has called "access tiering," in which content and applications pay different access charges depending on the levels of service they would like to receive. The concern is that allowing large content and applications to obtain guaranteed levels of bandwidth will restrict the opportunities of other innovators who wish to offer Internet-based services (U.S. Senate 2006a). These arguments overlook the fact that the type of discrimination they decry represents one of the most innovative ways found to date to mitigate the problems of congestion and latency on the Internet. The following example provides an apt illustration of this point: Suppose that an end user located in Los Angeles attempts to download a Web page from a leading content provider, such as CNN.com. If CNN hosted the content itself, all such queries would be transmitted to CNN's server (presumably located in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta). The distance that the packets composin