The you expect that your service providers

The United States is on the verge of a major change in internet regulation that could greatly affect everyone in the country and beyond the border even affecting us Canadians.

We could see the end of net neutrality soon but many of us are not even sure what it really is. In the following paragraphs I’ll be covering why net neutrality is important and why it should be maintained and what would happen without it and finally why it’s in the process of getting killed off (why some think it’s good). When you open up your phone, laptop tablet or any other device connected to the internet you have certain expectations. You expect to be connected to whatever service you wish. You expect that your service providers aren’t upsetting your data.

You hope to be responsible for what you need to do on the web and have full control over what you do. When you use the web you expect net neutrality! So what exactly is net neutrality and why does it matter so much? Net neutrality is an arrangement of standards and guidelines that say internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all data equally without blocking or slowing down certain data streams. This implies an ISP, for example, Comcast can’t slow down data to a video streaming service like Netflix in favor for its own streaming service Xfinity nor would it be able to block Fox News for NBC, which is possessed by Comcast. Also the internet could be subdivided into packages just like your tv service. By this I mean for example if you like Facebook Snapchat and Instagram, Twitter or any other social media platforms these could all be bundled into packages and you’d have to pay an access fee to use these services,  ones before that were all included with your internet fee. The internet without Net Neutrality isn’t really the internet that we  know and love.

Unlike the open internet that has paved the way for so much innovation from small startup companies such as Oneplus and gave a chance for anyone to become the next big google, apple, coke, it would become a closed-down network where cable and phone companies call the shots and decide which websites, companies, content or applications succeed. This would have an enormous impact on small startups. Companies like Verizon Comcast and  AT, would be able to decide who is heard and who isn’t. They’d be able to block anything that compete with their own offerings.