Keep Our Internet Open; Net Neutrality in Five Paragraphs

You currently pay $50+ per month for basic internet. You can connect to Google, Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, Wikipedia, Steam and SadiqSamani.com at the same speed across the board. None of these websites gets special treatment.

Comcast, Time Warner, and other broadband internet companies, that are listed at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys every year, believe that they should be able to choose which websites would get faster speeds when delivering their content (news, shopping, music, movies, games) to you. This would mean that not only are you paying for your internet, but companies you want to interact with must pay more for better access to you, even though they also pay to connect to the internet already. That’s like allowing you to call Best Buy without any issue, but when you call their local competitor, B&H, you’d have to wait much longer to connect because B&H couldn’t pay the toll for faster service delivery as Best Buy did, even though both companies already paid for a phone line. Anyone that has dealt with Best Buy knows they suck emu balls, so a move like this would give providers the ability to charge for the same service twice while stifling competition.

That’s not counting the fact that these broadband companies have a monopolistic grapple in most cities in which the customer has only one choice for internet service. These broadband companies already provide shitty service, overcharge you as compared to other western countries, and now they want to control the level of service you receive based on which companies are willing to line their gold dipped pockets with more gold. The US is currently 30^th in internet speeds (24.04 mbps), 69% less bandwidth than the fastest (79.48 mbps in Hong Kong). We are way behind, all due to these same companies.

FCC agrees with these behemoths and is coming out with a plan to allow Comcast and Time Warner to change access from “neutral” to being “selective” as long as any monetary actions taken by the providers are commercially “reasonable”. Of course, we all have faith that Comcast would know what reasonable is. After all, Comcast thinks television service should cost upwards of $100.

The internet has allowed growth that most of us take for granted. To put an even heftier price tag for doing anything on the internet will limit the ability to innovate, which usually happens by smaller companies that cannot compete with money. Personally, I feel that open and fast gigabit internet should be available to everyone, for FREE! Talk about economic growth this would spur when everyone has fast access. It would be a bigger boom than the dot com of the ’90s. The FCC makes their decision soon. Write to them and your Congressman/Senator and tell them you want to keep access open to all and to strengthen Net Neutrality, not weaken it. Here’s another article on how to communicate with the FCC about this issue.