Net Neutrality Is A Very Good Thing
D. S. Mitchell
Saturday in the middle of the night the GOP Senate passed a tax reform bill, Trump went psycho on Twitter, an agitated North Korea fired another missile, Kushner was tied to Flynn and Russian Ambassador Kislyak, and a platoon of powerful men were being brought down for sexual harassment.
Hard to imagine, but amidst all these issues, I believe the end of net neutrality in the United States will become the most important, historically. The internet has been the bulwark of much of the country’s economic growth over the last twenty years, in fact, the internet has produced some of the most powerful and richest companies on the planet. Exemplified by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon.
It has to be admitted that the economic muscle created by the new online giants came at the cost of the brick-and-mortars, the analogs and the manufacturers. This country’s economic fortunes have been dependent on the enormous growth of these internet entrepreneurs and startup companies, which have changed our world, in some ways for the better, and in some ways for the worse.
The internet, the last great libertarian frontier of entrepreneurship, free from government intervention and the constraints of the physical world, is at serious risk. Net Neutrality is about to be cancelled by the FCC, led by Republican chairman Ajit Pai.
Imagine it this way, you now access the internet to view a website, or stream video at pretty much the same speed as everyone else in the United States. The companies that built the internet must treat all traffic exactly the same, no matter where it is headed, or how it got there.
Service providers claim net neutrality is an unfair burden that limits their ability to recoup their development costs. These ISP’s (Internet Service Provider’s) have made significant investments in the online infrastructure, and they want to be allowed to monetize their investment into more revenue and higher dividends for their shareholders.
The FCC Commission is under Republican control, holding 3 of the 5 seats on the panel. If the FCC moves forward, as it keeps signaling it will, the net neutrality rule will be eliminated. If allowed to do so, ISP’s can soon sell a faster connection to certain destinations, for certain customers. For example, Twitter might benefit from that situation. A customer could load their site faster and at a lower cost than you could another site, a site which does not have the financial ability to pay Spectrum or Comcast, or any other ISP for that matter, to give faster (preferred) service to their site.
On the customer side, if you rely solely on the big name players–the entrenched interests with the deepest pockets–perhaps you will be content with a slightly cheaper internet. But, if you want to go somewhere on the internet where your provider has little financial stake in you visiting, prepare for it to be slower, and more expensive.
The death of net neutrality is bad for entrepreneurship. It’s bad for the next innovation. It’s bad for consumers who want fair competition for their time, their traffic and their dollars.
If net neutrality comes to an end, the power of the corporate giants will surely benefit. They will be handed the power to restrict competition and promote their own interests. A true bonanza.
Some predict that the internet will become just another dead, abandoned shopping mall that shuffles its customers from one promoted site to another, where is stands to make the most money. It would be sad if the internet went the way of the abandoned malls that blight the American landscape. It would be a tragic ending for the most important and dynamic economic innovation of the last century.
Net neutrality is a good thing, my friends. I know that with everything else swirling around it is hard to know what to focus on. But now, we must gather our forces and #KillTheBill AND stop the elimination of net neutrality.
Contact your Senators and your Representative and demand the tax bill be shelved, AND tell them you demand net neutrality be saved.
I was also told by a friend that we should also be emailing the FCC commissioners directly. The five commissioners email addresses are as follows:
1)Ajit.Pai@fcc.gov 2)MignonClyburn@fcc.gov 3)MichaelO’Rielly@fcc.gov 4)Brandan.Carr@fcc.gov 5)Jessica Rosenworcel@fcc.gov
I was also told that in your email you must specify, ‘I support net neutrality and Title ll (2) Oversight of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s).
These battles are worth fighting. Don’t give up, 2018 is just around the corner and we can sweep this nightmare out of office. #VoteDem, #BlueWave2018
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Dar
