Net Neutrality
and why you should pay attention to it
There are a lot of components and a lot a politics involved in Net Neutrality. You have seen it on the internet, you have listened to it on the news, and even our president Barack Obama had something to say about it.
What is net neutrality?
"You can’t regulate the speed of ideas. The Internet is one of the greatest engines for economic growth and prosperity the world has ever known."
Net Neutrality has a couple of things going for it. First and foremost, Net Neutrality encourages all data to be treated equally, on both the user's end and the company who created the website. Secondly, that information should be easy to access and create. And finally, that the internet should be a competitive service with competitive prices. Many groups and agencies agree that the internet should be free and open.
A free and open internet would mean basically how the internet exists now. This means that the full resources of the internet are easily accessible to individuals and companies. Basically, you do not have to foot the bill for your Netflix, gaming, ect. These companies currently do that for us.
The current fight is about Title II, a guideline that guided how telecommunication companies were required to provide equal access to customers. This Title is currenlty being debated and re-written to include broadband companies as well. This is why the cable companies are not happy.
Why does it affect me?
As a 20-30 something year old, a large part of what you do it based around the internet. We check our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and practically live off of netflix and youtube. Who needs TV anymore, right? Well if Net neutrality were to go away, you could be paying for the internet as well as certain services you couldn't live without. This would be those expensive to maintain services exactly like Netflix and Facebook and Google searching.
This idea isn't new. This same idea is already used for some TV companies (have you ever heard of Game of Thrones?) and for the most part these services are not argued against. People are so upset about a tiered internet system because the internet has always been free and open.
This could also affect designers. We want our work to be seen and this is less likely to happen because the internet would be a tiered off service. The information would see less people.
Who is involved?
There are a few major sides to this game. First of all, you have the general public who in general have shown their outcry against the idea of a tiered internet. You also have the FCC, the Internet association (which include companies like google, facebook, netflix, Amazon, ect.), and parts of congress who also argree that the internet should be free and open and fall under the title II act which would secure neutrality. These entities fear that broadband services could throttle services that don't pay premium.
Finally we have the corporate part of America who believes that net neutrality would be a bad thing. This includes Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Intel, IBM and more. They believe tightened rules by the FCC would lead to many lost investments and would cause billions of dollars in loss. They believe that internet "toll roads" would provide better service to companie that can support their higher traffic volums, not slow everyone one else down. You can read that interesting article here.