Assignment 4: Thoughts on Network Neutrality

Net neutrality is something that is extremely important to many people. Net neutrality is equality for all data on the web. It is the idea that no data will be favored over another, any packets moving through the internet will move at the same speed as its peers. In other words, a video loading on Netflix will download at an equivalent speed to a video on Youtube without any restrictions put in place by Internet Service Providers or others. The main pro of net neutrality is that it allows all data to be accessed equally, anyone who wants to move data on the internet has the same ability to do so. The main con is that the ISPs that provide the data have to raise the costs for all customers because of the massive amounts of data being used by video sites (Netflix, Youtube, Hulu) and others. Because of this someone who only uses email (using very little data) and someone streaming hours of videos (using massive amounts of data) both pay the same price, which makes it so the ones only using email are essentially paying for the video streamers data. If there was no net neutrality ISPs would be able to completely dictate how we consume our data and charge us based upon that.

A United States court ruled against net neutrality.The fallout from this is that ISPs can now technically regulate how we browse the internet. They can slow down the speed at which we view Youtube videos for instance. They can also charge more when customers access certain sites that consume massive amounts of data. On top of that it also enables the ISPs to haggle directly with websites and allow higher traffic on certain websites. The devastation this could cause is kind of mind-boggling. In one move a company like Hulu could pay an exorbitant sum to knock out a site like Crackle or Netflix by making a deal with ISPs to ensure download speeds on their sites would beat their competitors.

 Net neutrality is directly linked with freedom of speech because it is the idea that anyone and everyone who wants to say something, provide something, do anything on the internet is able to. If data is discriminated against and restricted in any way, shape, or form the owner of that data's freedom of speech is being violated. If an ISP like Verizon for instance decides that it doesn't like the political views of the Huffington Post, without net neutrality it could technically crush the bandwidth on that site and make it inaccessible. That kind of restriction of communications seems to me like a massive violation of freedom of speech, especially seeing as it's on the biggest communications platform the world has ever seen.

The court ruling on net neutrality could be extremely influential on my life. My family already runs over the data limits on our phone plans every month. I have no doubt that we would be part of those targeted to pay more money if plans like that were implemented by ISPs. If not that kind of plan, we would definitely be subject to paying to access high bandwidth sites as well. By consuming massiv amounts of data, I would immediately have to be very concerned about the implications of this ruling. It seems almost inevitable that I would be affected in a similar way as to how cellphone bills have begun setting limits on data and then charging large amounts for jumping over those limits.

On principle, I strongly agree with the Netflix article and believe that sites that use high bandwidth and those that frequent them should face the brunt of the cost and that net neutrality should be maintained in such a manner. By this way everyone could continue to get consume data at the same rate from all sources on the internet without having to face blanket increases in cost for ISP customers. Being extremely self-centered I would rather the ISPs raise costs for everyone because I consumed so much data that I might not even be able to sustain the new costs that ISPs might put in place. Regardless of what is done to keep up with the cost of how much exponentially increasing data we are consuming, I believe the idea of net neutrality is very important. The information made available on the internet should be equally accessible to anyone who seeks to absorb it. Anyone who wants to share something should be able to without being discriminated against, either because of how much data they are using or the content they are providing. If ISPs or the government were in control of how data was distributed on the web, the freedom of speech we treasure so much would be out of our hands, which seems fundamentally unjust to me.


http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/01/net_neutrality_d_c_circuit_court_ruling_the_battle_s_been_lost_but_we_can.html

- Besides simply knowing Slate to be a reliable source; it has a date and time that it was published. It has an author who is very reliable based on his occupation and associations. It is provided by Slate, which is known to provide reliable and intelligent articles. At the bottom of the article they laud the author as, "a Future Tense fellow at New America, a practicing lawyer, and a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet Society."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/business/international/eu-panel-adopts-net-neutrality-and-mobile-roaming-rules.html?hpw&rref=business&_r=0

-The authors can be seen clearly, the date of publication as well. The New York Times is lauded as a reputable and reliable news provider.The content of the article is intelligent, concise, and well edited. The reporter is mentioned as being on scene at the event the article is expounding.

I Have Nothing to Hide

Diminishing privacy is absolutely terrifying to me. But like many people, I tend to see it as mostly an inevitable fact of life. I accept that I am constantly providing details about myself to the world, and cling to the hope that it won't somehow turn around and bite me in the end. No one should be completely ambivalent and not have a care in the world though. In an age of rapidly expanding identity theft it is ignorant to ignore how accessible our personal details are. Beyond the fact that some psycho could probably find you and kill you if they desired, there is also simply the fact that important and revealing things concerning your job, you, and those you care about is at least somewhat accessible to anyone who would want to do harm to you. Without a barrier between the public and private realms we have no place to be entirely comfortable and rest before returning to the public realm, suddenly it is all public and this can be a scary combination of exhausting and exhilarating.

Social Media and Privacy

I found the Newsweek article to be incredibly depressing because of the duality of terrible personal things becoming public. On the one hand it is the worst thing that could possibly happen to have a young women's most horrifying and personal moment be made public. But on the other hand it provides a catalyst for discussing and approaching the issue of rape in contemporary news. In this way it may even be possible to prevent further rapes or at least create better and more powerful consequences to hold those committing the rapes responsible.
But this doesn't only have to be applied to cases of rape, any number of embarrassing, revealing, terrifying, depressing, etc. moments of our lives can be made public. As made clear in the video we watched, even when you hit delete, those images, those experiences you may not have wanted to share are still there. Social networking we have a small amount of control over how we ourselves interact and share information, but we have no control over how others share and interact with information concerning us. That can be overwhelming and sometimes have devastating psychological impacts (KONY).

Living in a Networked World

Thus far, I have learned and discussed about the Internet and its implications quite a bit. I have discovered that there are a variety of opinions about these implications ranging from extremely optimistic to entirely pessimistic. Discovering the truth about whether the Internet and living in an age of connectedness' impact on people seems to be an almost impossible answer to find. This is the result of technology evolving so rapidly that concrete evidence about the effects it has on the human condition are hard to find. This is not for lack of trying, many people have written on and pontificated on the good and bad of the Internet and that is what we strive to explore in this course. I hope that by soaking up as much information about the Internet I will be able to construct a better concept of what the effects of it are on myself and my generation. Maybe, just maybe, I will even be able to lean towards the optimistic or pessimistic viewpoint depending on what I wind up discovering. It's clear so far that there is a brand new frontier out there that is simply inviting us to explore; what the implications of that exploration will be is up to debate.