Geek vs Life

Last years hot topic issue was net neutrality and how we had to protect it. Battles were fought, petitions were signed but 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, hence the neutrality. Thus when you open up a page like geek-vs-life.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 two dozen images and videos WILL load slower than someone how just has a colored background. It’s all about content.

So here is the problem that is surfacing. A handful of major broadband ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) (ie: 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 the consumer will be looking to purchase a new home computer for example, and he tried searching store B, but the page was taking forever to load, so he went to the site of store A and everything is available instantly. It creates a unleveled playing field in the market place.

But the problems do not end there. If the ISP have control at which rates you can gain access to certain site, it can also censor what sites you have access too by giving you no access to it. Let’s say ISP-A is a very Christian 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 is politics. If ISP-A believes candidate A is better, it can simply block off access to all of candidate B websites.

Everyone has their preferred search engine, whether it’s Yahoo, Webcrawler, MSN, Google or other. 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 follow the links below:

Save the Internet .com
Google Help Center: Net Neutrality
Moyers on America

Also watch these great videos from the people at savetheinternet.com.

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