 providers. The backbone directs the packets to other backbone providers until they reach the The Regulation of Broadband Networks and the Internet backbone connected to the middle-mile provider that serves the destination. The middle-mile provider then directs the packets to the terminating last-mile provider, which passes them on to the server hosting the Web page content. The Web server fulfills the request, and the packets composing the Web page return through a similar set of steps. Congestion results from the fact that the capacity of almost every step in this process is constrained. For example, the bandwidth of each component of the physical transmission media (e.g., the wires and fiber nodes composing the network) is limited. 5 The number of packets and requests that routers and content servers can fulfill at any time is similarly constrained. When data packets arrive at a rate that exceeds the capacity of any particular element, they form a queue. The resulting delay in the speed with which the requests are fulfilled causes degradation in the quality of service provided by the network. Changes in the ways people are using the Internet are making these problems all the more acute. The Internet was once dominated by e-mail and other applications that placed fairly modest demands on the network, and the restrictions imposed by the National Science Foundation on backbone services limited the Internet to noncommercial uses. The subsequent privatization of the Internet has greatly increased the number of network users as well as the heterogeneity of network usage (Yoo 2004b). These changes have increased the variability of demand in ways that have made problems of network management considerably more complex. For example, the emergence of Web page downloading, which requires the transfer of images and multimedia features, has increased the intensity of bandwidth usage, as has the emergence of music filesharing and other applications involving the transfer of increasingly large files. In addition, end users ar