Why am I skeptical of a government plan for something so benign sounding as “net neutrality”? Is it as harmless as it sounds?
‘Net neutrality’ means ‘keeping the internet the way it is’ - in other words, you pay your ISP like usual, and you can access any site on the internet that you please. I don’t understand why it’s mostly Dems who are supporting this (given that it was Libertarians who popularised it), although it may be that Republicans tend not to have tech laws high on their priority list, and this law appeals to younger, tech-savvy voters who happen to be primarily Democrat.
If there was a ‘non-neutral’ internet, you could pay only for the types of sites you wanted to access, much like cable: You might have a basic package with Google and wikipedia and news and nonprofit sites, then there might be additional ‘sports’ packages, or ‘porn’ packages, or ‘kids/educational’ packages that you could purchase. While this might seem like a good idea at first, there are two major problems: It would make it harder and more expensive for people to create new websites and get traffic to them, and also if your internet service company had a liberal slant, do you think FR or other sites they might disagree with would come in any of your ‘packages’? Or do you think they’d make you pay top dollar for ‘unlimited’ access to sites they disagree with? Lack of net neutrality would, among other things, allow ISP’s to essentially blacklist any website they felt like.
If net neutrality is defeated, your ISP could start dividing up the Internet and deciding what sites you can see, charging you for certain sites, charging you based on the amount of data you download, etc. If Cablevision was run by Democrats, for instance, they could (in theory) "throttle" Free Republic and make it virtually impossible for you to access it.
The concept of net neutrality is that the people who provide the Internet *cannot* determine what is "good" or "bad". They must simply provide the road (the Internet connection) and you, the citizen, get to determine how to use it. Anyone who believes the government or corporations have ZERO business telling us what Internet sites we should watch MUST support net neutrality. Anyone who opposes it has a vested, financial interest in it.
If net neutrality is defeated, I could buy a small ISP and charge my customer $3 for every Gigabyte over 5 gigabytes per month, for instance. Then you would find yourself facing $300 bills, just like a cell phone.
In April, Time Warner and some other ISPs tried to introduce this (you can read about one attempt here: http://www.physorg.com/news159039174.html) They were going to charge customers by the total number of websites they loaded. What happens if Time Warner buys MSNBC? They could literally only let you access liberal sites. This isn't a joke.
Anyone who supports the rights of individual citizens to decide what they want to read, or publish, MUST (I repeat ***MUST***) support net neutrality. I can say, with an absolute clear conscious and total conviction after studying the issue that anyone who tells you net neutrality is a bad thing is either an idiot or they are flat out lying to you because they work for a major media company and will make a huge profit from determining which sites you can read or access.