Net Neutrality

If you are not familiar with the term net neutrality, new neutrality means;

NET NEUTRALITY: a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the internet that advocates no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as communication that is not unreasonably degraded by other traffic.

Basically, this means that the internet is free and that there are no biases dictated by your internet service provider, or ISP.

We currently have net neutrality. This is not an end in which we are aiming for, but a freedom that we are striving to keep. Net neutrality is explained better here. You may be asking yourself why this is important, or why this is an issue of concern. Well the reason is that the internet currently is free and all users can access any sites that they want at any time. Most people take this freedom for granted though. It would be in the interest of most big businesses and websites to create exclusive contracts between an ISP and a website. Let's say for example Optimum Online was to sign a contract with Yahoo! so that Yahoo! was the exclusive search engine of all Optimum Online customers. Yahoo! would make tons of money knowing that all people who have Optimum Online would only use their website, and it cut out all of the other competition. Optimum Online would sign a nice fat contract and make tons of money as well. Everybody wins, right? Wrong. Being able to go to the site of our choice is one of the great freedoms of the internet. This was a luxury that people were able to enjoy decades ago with their newspapers as well, until the big newspapers got bigger and the small newspapers were weeded out. Now people only have so many options when it comes to their newspaper and only have so many opinions to choose from. The very fact that I am writing this blog at this moment is an example of the freedom of the internet. Although I, as well as most other people, take this freedom for granted, it is a wonderful opportunity to have your voice heard over the internet.

The idea of losing net neutrality is a very scary, yet very possible reality. This would benefit most big businesses, so it seems very possible that we could lose this freedom. Luckily, i don't personally think this will be happening in the near future. For one, our president publicly spoke out for net neutrality, which you can see here, which i hope is a sign that this is an issue that our government is aware of and wants to protect. Imagine an internet where your social networking site was chosen for you? Or where your search engine was selected for you and you did not have a choice? What is your ISP suddenly no longer offered facebook as a website available to their customers? It would make things very tricky for most people, and could result in people paying three our four internet bills just so they could use all of the websites that they wanted. This is not a future that I think anyone would like to see.

I personally am very much in favor of net neutrality. I cannot think of any benefits in getting rid of net neutrality, other than big businesses making more money, which i do not think is in my best interest. This is an issue i feel very strong about, and if it seemed like net neutrality was in any way threatened, i would do anything in my power to keep us from losing it. For any information that I did not cover, here is the wikipedia page on net neutrality which goes much more in depth and gives lots of good information on the issue.