Net Neutrali… What?
“I ain’ts be supportin no net neuroology!”
What is this Net Neu-tra-lity? I can’t even type it, let alone say it. But congress, or some shitty committee — I don’t know. I don’t follow that political crap — like yesterday, or the day before, assassinated some legislation on the subject. I don’t know if the bill was for or against net neutrality. I think it was against, so I guess it was a good thing it was taken out. Who knows.
There’s this funny clip here that shows how much our elected officials know about the Internet, which is very little. The even funnier thing is that I know only a little bit more than they do. So, this post will be a hard one for my little ole’ brain. So, let’s get down to the nitty gritty.
From what I’ve been reading and hearing, it seems like those that oppose net neutrality oppose it because it would negate their ability to set prices for content providers that use up a large amount of their bandwidth.
Let’s say you’re on Comcast, and you love music. You have an ipod, and you love itunes. And let’s say that you’re not the only person on Comcast who loves itunes. Comcast discovers that people connecting to itunes and downloading content are eating up about 10 percent of their bandwidth.
From this information, Comcast decides that it should charge Apple a fee for this bandwidth usage. If Apple doesn’t agree, Comcast can continue throttling all information from all itunes servers that try to go through Comcast servers. Throttling is when a Internet Service Provider purposely slows down or corrupts bits of information sent through its servers to individual users. In fact, some isps do it today to internet protocols like bittorrent because they believe these bits of information might be eating up excessive amounts of their bandwidth.
This essentially means that if Apple doesn’t pay Comcast the right to send data through Comcast’s servers, itunes will be blocked for most Comcast customers, or at the very least, it will a take a long time to access the itunes site and download content from there.
Right now, isps don’t have the right to charge other companies for sending data through their networks. Why? Because we live under net neutrality right now. Instead, today, like stated above, they simply make it hard for their users to access data that comes from servers they believe might be using up too much of their bandwidth.
But this isn’t the only reason isps dislike net neutrality. They dislike it because companies like Comcast don’t like competing companies using their network to deliver similar products, essentially taking customers away from them using their own network.
Comcast, itself, is a content provider. It also provides phone services. In the future, Comcast may want to deliver their content over the Internet, all the movies and sports and cable channels, supported through fees and advertisements.
And until they decide if they want to do this, they may want to halt or slow down other companies who want to do the same thing, companies, like say, YouTube, or Google Video, or perhaps NetFlix. They may also want to slow down the growth of companies like Skype or Vonage, who are essentially providing cheap to free phone services over their lines. If Comcast could charge fees to these services, they could possibly slow down their adoptions, or put them out of business. I doubt if a company like Skype would be able to continue with free computer-to-landline services if Comcast and AT&T hit them with large bandwidth bills every month.
Now, I’m sure some of you are probably wondering what the problem is? Why shouldn’t Comcast and AT&T and other isps be able to charge certain companies for sending data through their networks? Well, here’s the problem, they already charge people for that bandwidth usage, me and you.
Those isps charge monthly fees for access to their networks. And companies like Google and YouTube and Apple already pay network, server, and bandwidth bills to access the Internet. So, if I’m paying to access the Internet, and they’re paying to access the Internet, why shouldn’t we all be able to connect? And why should there be extra fees on top of those everyone already pays to make those connections.
And ask yourself this, who really will end up paying those extra fees? Who always ends up paying those extra fees? You got it, you and me. The consumer always ends up footing the bill.
So, tell me, I pay my money to AT&T to access content on the Internet, and I pay Itunes my money to access their content, why shouldn’t I be able to get my content in a timely manner according to that fee I paid AT&T.
If I pay for a 1.5 connection, why shouldn’t my connection speeds between itunes and my computer be at 1.5 or close to it? Isn’t that what I’m paying for. If AT&T wants to add limits to the amount of bandwidth an individual can use, I see no problem with that. At least that would be upfront of them. At least they would be taking money from out of my hand instead of out of my ass. But no, they want to be sneaky about it. They want to charge greater fees without looking like they’re charger greater fees.
And that to me is unethical and deceitful.
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