The principle of net neutrality

In recent days there has been a lot of speculations concerning a vote on net neutrality. Although many are not of aware of the situation, we do have a few who knows and understands what is going on. First of all what is net neutrality? How does is affect society as a whole? How are consumers affected?

To clear the air, net neutrality is basically a principle in which internet providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites. Today, December 14, 2017 marks the date when a vote was taken for federal regulators to allow internet providers to speed up services for websites they favor and block down or slow down others, states Jhaan Elker. In the event that a consumer owns a certain network then they can choose to slow down another network. For example, Verizon who owns Yahoo, can decide to slow down other popular websites such as Google, Bing and etc. just because they only own Yahoo. This will be hurting Verizon customers because what if most customers have google accounts? How will they be able to access them if Verizon slows down these other popular websites or even bans them from being used on theirnetwork?

Despite the fact that this ban allows network companies to slow down or block certain websites, consumers are also allowed to charge customers to go on these websites to. In the nature of doing a research paper which requires you have online sources you would have to pay a fee just to see the content on that website. These fees vary from the price range of 1$-15$ just to get on a website. What if you pay to visit the website and get information and end up getting invalid information that does not support your assignment? You will be basically paying for no reason. Not only that, but also keep in mind that there are lower class families and lower income families. Most households in these situations only have one parent that is able to work or even just one parent living with them. How will they be able to afford paying to visit a website for information? It denies children in these particular situations/conditions to not be allowed get the proper information they need for their homework assignments.

With this ban being on the verge of success along with all the negative effects trailing behind, has many people worried, along with consumers too. Not only will it allow companies to slow down competitors websites but it will also have the ability to impact innovation. Competition will be ruled out. Despite that this may bring many advantages too many networks, many disagree with this ban and want it to be repealed because they will be losing money, and if they are not able to gain money they will not have the opportunity to improve their service for us. According to Save the Internet “ The internet without Net Neutrality isn’t really the internet. Unlike the open internet that has paved the way for so much innovation and given a platform to people who historically been shut out, it would become a closed-down network where cable and phone companies call the shots and decide which websites, content or applications succeed.” Clearly, this ban has many negative effects on customers as well as consumers. For consumers to have the right to choose which websites their customers may or may not use is wrong and is giving them too much power which may later be abused to a certain extent. This bill also will deny the children who live in lower income households the right to surf the web freely when they are in need of completing their homework assignments. I hope this letter is read thoroughly and used in the decision making of this ban not being legalized or not.