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"On the Internet, the traffic cops are blind - they don't look at the data they're directing, and they don't give preferential treatment.

That's something operators of the Internet highway, the major U.S. phone companies, want to change by effectively adding a toll lane: They want to be able to give priority treatment to those who pay to get through faster.

Naturally, consumer advocates and the Web companies that would be paying the toll are calling it highway robbery.

'Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success,' Vinton Cerf told a Senate committee recently. Cerf, who played a key role in building the Internet, is now the 'Chief Internet Evangelist' at Google Inc.

On the Internet, information is carried in 'packets,' small chunks of data. An e-mail might be divided into several packets and travel different routes to the destination, much like cars have multiple ways of getting somewhere. The packets may arrive out of order, a few even late, but data can be reassembled to reconstitute the e-mail."