One of the fundamental design principles of today's Internet is so basic and so important that few users have ever heard its name; they just assume its existence. It's called "end-to-end," and some disturbing new developments are putting it in jeopardy. The end-to-end principle asserts that information pushed into one end of the Internet should come out the other without modification: the Net should act like a big, fat, dumb, digital pipe.

End-to-end operates on many levels. When you try to download a news Web page, for example, the two ends might be CNN's server and your browser. End-to-end dictates that the Internet shouldn't modify CNN's data packets as they move through the network. It thus guarantees that the page you receive is the same one CNN sent. Who could argue with that?