Net neutrality: the good versus the bad

Hello! This is my next assignment on net neutrality. It covers the good and bad players in the net neutrality debate. Thanks for reading!

Remember net neutrality? It’s the principle that the Internet should remain open and free without prioritization. Remember the ISPs? They want to impose restrictions on the Internet, creating an unfair Internet. Good, because now I will delve into why net neutrality is good and why I think the ISPs are the “bad guys” that we must fight in order to achieve Internet freedom.

Net neutrality is an issue of Internet freedom: we use the Internet for gaming, streaming, reading the news, and also for research and homework. It has become the main medium for not only watching content, but also learning what’s going on in the world. According to the Pew Research Center, “50% of the public now cites the Internet as a main source for national and international news.” We’d rather check a #hashtag on Twitter than watch the TV nowadays.

However, the freedom of the Internet includes not only the ability to access all of it, but also for it to be a fast and reliable tool. According to freepress.org, “Computer scientists at Microsoft have shown that people will visit a website less often if it’s slower than a rival site by more than 250 milliseconds.” This is Internet culture. We want instant access and if we can’t get that, we move on. Net neutrality ensures that all websites funded by big corporations AND the one-man business are treated equally. It would preserve Internet freedom by allowing every website to be easily accessible to any user.

The “bad guys” are against net neutrality because of the issue of bandwidth use. Users who watch Netflix all day take up much more bandwidth than people who check their email once a day. The Netflix users clog the bandwidth and make everything run slower. Creating a two-tiered Internet as mentioned in my previous blog would help unclog the “freeway” of the Internet, but at the expense of the “slow lane” users.

But, there's a better solution: fiber. Fiber uses light energy instead of electricity to transmit data. Netflix CEO and net neutrality supporter writes, "a single fiber-optic strand the diameter of a human hair can carry 101.7 terabits of data per second, enough to support nearly every Netflix subscriber watching content in HD at the same time," in Wired Magazine. This is the beauty of technology: it's amazing and it's constantly changing. Since it’s incredibly fast, it has the ability to resolve the bandwidth issue.

So, why are the “bad guys” extra bad? This whole net neutrality debate is about money. Carmel Lobello of The Week writes that the Internet is a “very lucrative business.” However, the ISPs’ “profits will start leveling off” because the “internet subscriber growth rate is finally starting to peak” since most people have Internet services already. Translation: they’re making boatloads of money and they want more. Tisk, tisk.

Forget the “bad guys” and let’s focus on why net neutrality is so good. Net neutrality gives us the power of creativity and innovation. It gives us our voice. The open Internet allows the everyday person to pursue their innovative ideas, and share it to the masses with a click of a button. I want this kind of creativity to be accessible for everyone on an equal level. English author Sir Ken Robinson said, “Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.” We, the Internet people, are fighting for that kind of creativity that changes and rocks the world.

From Save the Internet

I hope I have done my job in convincing you why net neutrality is good and why the ISPs are bad. If so, please check out Save the Internet. This website is dedicated to the net neutrality cause. There are many ways to show your support, a handful of those ways being Internet-based thanks to our freedom of speech on the Internet. If you believe as I do that net neutrality is a free speech issue and an important part of the Internet, then please help spread the word.

REVISED: The issue that no one is talking about, but affects us all

Hello, all! This is a revised aka better version of my assignment on net neutrality! Enjoy!
(Note:  I don't know why the pictures are squished....sorry.)

No more Netflix. No more YouTube. Slow Internet. How would that make you feel? This is our future if big companies get what they want. I’m talking about net neutrality, the idea that every Internet user should have unrestricted, free access to all of the Internet.

So what exactly is net neutrality? It is a concept coined in 2003 by law professor Tim Wu. His paper explains net neutrality and it’s relation to broadband discrimination, which is what we’re dealing with in present net neutrality issues. Wu explains in his paper that “proponents of open access see it as a structural remedy to guard against an erosion of the ‘neutrality’ of the network as between competing content and applications.” So, even back in 2003, Wu made it clear that net neutrality is about making the Internet a neutral place for all people to use and create things.

Tim Wu, coined "net neutrality"

There is so much talk about net neutrality lately -- mostly in the tech world -- because the big companies, also known as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), plan to restrict our access on the Internet. They could control what you do and where you go on the Internet. This goes against what Wu initially defined for net neutrality, which in simpleton terms “argues that no bit of information should be prioritized over another” according to the Open Computing Facility at Berkeley. It’s annoying that the initial principles of the Internet called for neutrality without any legal intervention, but now everything on the Internet seems to be regulated by the legal system.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the federal organization that will soon decide net neutrality’s fate. But, why are they getting involved? Well, what’s at issue with net neutrality is bandwidth. I will admit, on the behalf of all of us with an Internet addiction, that we use a lot of bandwidth. We watch things on Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube constantly, and the ISPs want to charge us more to access these bandwidth-heavy websites. And the people who don’t pay the extra fee either can’t access the website, or, if they can, they will be in the “slow lane” instead of the “fast lane.” This creates a two-tiered and unfair internet, according to Michael Weinberg of Public Knowledge. So, while net neutrality initially meant that the Internet was solely governed by the user, it is now being controlled by the government....joy.

If you haven’t figure this out already, net neutrality is good! It will keep innovation on the Internet. Big companies -- including Google, Kickstarter, and Netflix -- and Internet users fight for net neutrality because they believe that creating a “closed internet” would stamp out innovation. Startups like Google and Facebook dominate the Internet today. However, if these regulations were put in place back then, they wouldn’t have made it because they wouldn’t have been able to afford to beat out the competition by paying for priority access in the “fast lane.” Can you imagine a world without the ease and magic Google? The Internet is an awesome place for creativity and innovation and net neutrality helps keep that safe. This is why we, as Internet lovers, need to educate ourselves about net neutrality and fight for it.