Net Neutrality A MUST!

According to Wikipedia, network neutrality is when a neutral broadband network is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached and on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonable degraded by other communication streams. Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor, defines network neutrality as, “A network design principle that allows maximally useful public information network that aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally.”
Network neutrality is an issue causing a lot of debate. On one side of the debate is the broadband companies who feel that have the right to control what applications and content their subscribers are utilizing on the Internet. By doing this, they can make sure that users are obtaining data from their own sponsors or media interests. On the other side, are people that believe broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content.
As we all know money makes the world go round, and certain companies are willing to pay phone and cable companies an extra fee in return for filtering content and favoring certain Web sites and applications. What it means to filter and favor certain web pages means that the content on those cites will load faster work more efficiently and overall work a lot better. While other web pages not favored by these companies will load very slowly or not at all. However, those on the side of non-neutrality argue that with Web sites like Google, the Internet is already bias against smaller competitors because popular cites like Google have a performance advantages.
I can see where both side are coming from in this debate. Broadband providers are right that big companies like Google do have great advantages over their smaller competitors, but at the same time the smaller competitors are not the ones that are going to be able to afford to pay off the phone and cable companies, therefore allowing non-neutrality definitely would not make the internet more equal in any way. It is my opinion that the Internet was created to allow anyone who has access to it to obtain information on whatever they want from wherever they want, and I think that principle should remain. The only reason why companies would be against neutrality when it comes to the Internet are greedy CEO’s looking for more money because apparently they aren’t already rich enough.
More than anything, I think network neutrality should 100% be mandatory in the United States. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia that are not democratic filter out news content on the Internet in order to prevent their citizens from obtaining information in order to suppress them. The US on the other hand is a democracy and although I know that the reason why companies here want to prevent their users from accessing certain information is to lower their competition with other websites that provide the same things and not to suppress us, we still should have the choice to go to do whatever we want.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality November 14th