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.
