Editorial:
The FCC has announced that it wants to regulate the Internet. The program is officially called "Net Neutrality". Like the "Fairness Doctrine" the name is a bit deceiving mainly because there is nothing neutral in politics.
In order to understand the issue you must have a basic understanding of the Internet and the role of Internet Service Providers.
If you connect to the Internet, the large grid of interconnected data banks, you do so through a service provider. That might be your local cable company, your telephone company or a satellite company. Like phone service, somebody out there is on the other end of your connection sending you data and when you upload, sending your data on to others. The short hand for these providers is ISP.
Not all users of Internet services are equal however. You might use the web to get your email, read my blog, and maybe do a little shopping. But guys like me are downloading live content, watching streaming television shows, uploading a ton of data, transferring mountains of images and in fact streaming our own programming (e.g.Tech Talk For Old Dogs; The Marcus Carey Perspective). Other than people like me who use a dedicated T1 line, everybody else is sharing the same water pipe, so to speak.
If the Net neutrality rules applied to your water usage, it would prevent the water company from charging the guy who needs a million gallons of water more than the guy who only uses 100 gallons of water. So what is going to happen? Either the company goes out of business, can't afford to fix its pipes and generally lets the system fail, or, the cost to the little guy becomes unaffordable, since he has to cover the expense of the bigger user.
In addition, Net Neutrality prevents your ISP from limiting access to sites on the web which cost more to transmit. In other words, if you wanted to watch movies online and that consumed a ton of bandwidth, the amount of bandwidth available for your neighbors would drop. Again using the water analogy, if your neighbor chopped a hole in the water main to fill his lake, you might not get enough pressure to take a shower. Net Neutrality would prevent the water company from restricting the flow into your neighbor's lake.
But the real danger lies in the government's interference with the Internet which hasn't needed any government help to grow beyond any ones wildest imagination from just 10 years ago. The free market, the free exchange of ideas, the expansion and reliance upon the Internet for the answers to millions of questions has made the World Wide Web the biggest and most comprehensive free lending library in history. The real problem with Net Neutrality is giving the government control over that library and over this method of communication.
On one hand the supporters say that Net Neutrality will give everybody an equal voice and keep ISP's from sending down the pipe only that information which is most profitably delivered. On the other hand, to the extent that what is being piped in is being delivered by private industry it is much like the information being delivered by FoxNews, CNN, Time, Newsweek or the Washington Post: A free press means freedom from government interference.
We all know that one of the biggest lies in the world is this "I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help". And as Barry Goldwater said "A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
Perhaps the biggest concern of the Net Neutrality rules is that it allows the government to get it's camel nose under the tent. The Web has done just fine without government interference, it is not likely to do better with government interference or the threat of censorship that comes with it.
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