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| A clear inequality |
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One of the hot topics in the media
last year was the issue of net neutrality
and how we had to protect
it. Arguments were filed, battles
were fought and petitions were
signed. On Thursday September
6th, the following happened:
“The Justice Department this
week issued its support for a
tiered approach to Internet service,
and said that the imposition
of net neutrality laws would hinder
the continued growth of the
Web.”-Chloe Albanesius, PCmag.
com (Sept ‘07)
“The Justice Department today
said Internet service providers
should be allowed to charge a fee
for priority Web traffic.”-Dibya
Sarkar, Seattle Times
“The Bush administration believes
that government regulators
should be “highly skeptical”
of net-neutrality regulations and
instead rely on competition to protect
consumers.”-ZDnet.co.uk
To understand the implications
of this, one must first understand
what net neutrality is. When
people access the Internet, each
site gets to download at the same
speed using the same amount of
bandwidth no matter who you are,
and hence the neutrality. Thus,
when you open up a page like
bobs-hardware.com for example,
it should load on your screen at the
same speed as aol.com. Of course,
the speed at which a page opens
might make it seem like certain
pages load at different rates, but
that has nothing to do with bandwidth
allowances. It’s all about
page content. Your friend’s page
on Myspace.com with images and
videos WILL load slower than
someone who just has a colored
background. Again, it’s all about
content.
That’s where the problem is
surfacing. A handful of major
broadband ISPs (Internet Service
Providers) (i.e., Comcast, AT&T,
Verizon) are lobbying congress to
allow them to sell faster speeds
to certain pages. So let’s say you
try and open a page for a certain
major electronics store. Let’s call
it store A, who does pay for the
service. But local electronic store;
let’s call it store B, doesn’t. When
a consumer is looking to purchase
a new home computer for example,
and he tries searching through
Store B, the page may take forever
to load, so he visits Store A’s
site and everything is available
instantly. It creates a unleveled
playing field in the market place.
But the problems do not end
there. If the ISPs have control
over the rates that you can gain
access to certain sites, it can also
censor the sites you have access
too by giving you no access to it.
Let’s say that ISP-A is a relatively
conservative organization and
deems Internet pornography to
be indecent. All it has to do is shut
the bandwidth allotments and the
porn will no longer be accessible.
Another example of ISP-driven
censorship lies in politics. If ISPA
believes that Candidate #1 is
better, it can simply deny access
to all of Candidate #2’s websites.
Everyone has his or her preferred
search engine, whether
it’s Yahoo, WebCrawler, MSN,
Google or anything else. Without
web neutrality, an ISP can accept
money from a search engine to accelerate
it and slow down or cut off
the bandwidths of other engines.
Revoking net neutrality is akin
to censorship on a very grand
scale. It allows the power and
freedom to choose, to lay not in
the hands of the consumer, but in
the hands of the companies. It also
creates an unfair and unbalanced
marketplace.
For more information, please
visit the following websites:
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