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.
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