Net Neutrality

This Thursday (October 9th) in Dreese Labs room 266, I am presenting on Net Neutrality. See a summary of what I’m presenting below.

Key Points:

Net Neutrality is a principle, that if passed into law would prevent internet service providers from using their control over your internet connection for anything other than serving you.
- It prevents ISPs from blocking/degrading access to competitors' (or any) websites for commercial or political reasons.
- It prevents ISPs from blocking/degrading/prioritizing services, such as video streaming, VoIP, music downloads, etc.
Net Neutrality is not about restricting free-trade.
- Restrictions imposed on all companies will not create an “unfair advantage” for anyone.
- Restricting or degrading access to smaller-scale sites for political or commercial reasons does create an “unfair advantage”.
- Corporations will not regulate themselves. If their only incentive is money, and dis-servicing a few customers would make them an extra 10%, there is nothing but the law to stop them from it.
- The ISPs own the equipment, but they did not “invent” the internet, nor was the internet created with this in mind.
- Perhaps the most important reason, it is the very first amendment in our Bill of Rights. No media vendor has any place restricting people’s free speech, in the U.S. or anywhere.
  - There is no reason for ISPs to start charging website owners - who aren’t even on their network - just so their users are able to access said websites. That’s not a “special service” – it’s extortion for money.
ISPs claim that they can “improve quality” of services and websites by “prioritizing bandwidth” and cite the “congestion” as a dire need of action, and a sign of the “death of the internet”.
Restricting access to smaller websites, which is against net neutrality, would be the “death of the internet”. Nobody would visit said websites, owners wouldn’t generate enough revenue to continue hosting, and nearly all of the websites currently online would disappear forever by the end of the year.
The ability to charge incremental subscription rates for “premium bandwidth” would remove the providers' incentive to fix the problem. They’d instead charge premium providers more and more to degrade other subscribers' service, just so they can keep said premium providers' bandwidth at a constant rate.

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