Net Neutrality....?

Could you imagine a world where everything you do on the Internet is monitored? A world where we have to pay for the amount of Internet usage per month restricting us to the full use of the Internet. A world where large companies can control the Internet market causing new Internet sites to be shut down. This could become our world today…

This was all new information to my ears, as I never thought to think of this issue until my professor Ian Reilly started to discuss this issue in class. This was rather shocking information and the only hope we have from fighting to not become an Internet restricted world is net neutrality.

"The Definitions of net neutrality vary, but most advocates of neutrality agree it has evolved into the principle that the Internet should be kept open and free from interference or restrictions from service providers. That is, certain users or applications should not be favoured over others".

North America is a democratic continent, which means we have freedom. The Internet is a free place that was not supposed to have any sort of restrictions but it may begin to. These restrictions include the amount of information we can download per month and the speed of our Internet. We will soon have to pay for these so-called commodities to be able to use them if something is not done to stop this. It has already begun in Canada as "Bell Canada and Rogers have admitted to traffic shaping. Bell has also admitted to throttling. Rogers has reintroduced bit caps". This essentially means that these companies have placed a price on the amount of downloading per month and the individual speed of ones Internet.

In regards to Internet speed, it is extremely unjust for this very reason: "Advocates of net neutrality say a tiered system will favour bigger companies that can afford to pay ISPs for the faster speeds, which will give them an unfair advantage over smaller firms and individuals. This could prevent the next Google or Amazon from happening, since those companies started small but were able to experiment and grow on the Internet without restrictions".

What does this mean for us? It means good luck to all those Internet entrepreneurs who want to make it big on the Internet because they will be going up against the biggest Internet companies in the world, so they better have the cash to do so. Anyone who knows how large a company like Google is knows that with these new internet restrictions it will be physically and mentally impossible to generate any sort of competition for these well know internet sites. This is solely because our wallets are not as big as those of Google or Amazon. Essentially, these implications will cause the greater population of our world to have less freedom via the Internet unless something is done…if anything can even be done to stop this.

Works Cited

"FAQ: Net neutrality and internet traffic management." CBC News. Monday, October 19, 2009. CBC.ca, Web. 20 Nov 2009. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/02/f-net-neutrality-faq.html