What makes the Internet a champion to so many living things, even fragile coral reefs, but also a threat to despots?

What makes the Internet such a wonder is its egalitarian design. It was created to allow open, unrestricted access to all who use it. Unlike much human handiwork, which often has closed hierarchy, the Internet is open and classless, devised to treat all users as equals.

To understand this idea, called the "end-to-end" principle, consider the postal service. After an envelope is placed in a mail box, other than the destination address, no distinction is made about treating it differently from other envelopes. The mail personnel may sort the envelopes by postal code for routing purposes, but no preferential treatment is based on addresses or the contents within the envelope.

As a consequence of this approach, the Internet is designed to be application agnostic. It does not matter if the Internet's electronic envelopes contain letters, photographs, spreadsheets, or video clips. It does not matter if an email is addressed to a party in the same city or in another country. Nor does it matter who these parties are, much to the chagrin of the despots, mentioned earlier. The design is intended for all traffic to receive the same treatment.

But this design is being questioned. While the end-to-end principle continues to be the prevalent way of treating Internet users' traffic, the precept is being challenged. In some situations, the end-to-end principle has been altered (less sanguine critics use the word "violated"). Some enterprises which provide Internet services are treating certain "envelopes" differently from others.

How can this be? After all, how much information can a destination address on an Internet envelope provide about the contents inside the envelope? The answer is none - or at least very little. Certainly, the destination address reveals a location and identity of the party receiving the traffic, but not much else.

Rather than satisfying themselves with only relaying the traffic to the destination, some organizations and individuals are opening the envelope and looking at its contents. In this way, they can examine the nature of the traffic and treat it according to the information inside the envelope.

With this change, the end-to-end principle no longer holds. As a consequence of the opening of the Internet envelope, and the huge industries which have come about and continue to grow because of this change (Google and the NSA, as examples), the future of the Internet is far from settled. The examination of the contents inside the Internet envelope for purposes of preferential treatment, gathering of intelligence, and intrusion into privacy with targeted advertisements represents the casting away of the end-to-end principle.

Some say, "It's about time this change has come about. The end-to-end principle defies common sense." Others counter, "The abandonment of the end-to-end principle will represent the demise of privacy as we know it."

Is this assertion correct? We examine this claim in the third and last part of this series.