Net Neutrality and the Joy of Buffet Dining

Imagine there’s a buffet style restaurant you really like. They have crab legs. The service isn’t quite as good as the next town over, but it’s the only buffet in good driving distance and again, all you can eat crab legs. They even have self serve ice cream.

You’re having dinner one night and there’s another table there that is eating. You’ve had your usual one or two plate, but everyone at that other table has had six.

The manager comes out and goes to the table with all the six plate people and says “You owe me more money, now.”

They say, “We paid what everyone else paid. We’re just enjoying the food.”

The conversation gets so heated that the six plate people go outside and grab a cop who informs the manager that yes, they paid the agreed upon price, so they get to eat, as the sign says, all they want.

The manager is livid. Next day, they go to the town’s business office and get the rules changed so that they can randomly charge buffet diners in the middle of the meal if they wish. They also decide to move the crab legs to a seperate steam tray and now there’s an upcharge for that table. And they move the ice cream to the upcharge side, but that’s only because the cook doesn’t like the company’s commercials.

Of course, they say, the value is just the same because they’re putting out imitation crab sticks and their own brand of pudding that they’ve been pushing unsuccessfully on diners for years.

Now, to have the same meal you had before, you pay extra and all because the guys who wrote the rules didn’t like that someone was actually using the services they provided.

Welcome to the debate over Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality means that everything on the internet is accessible at the same speed your internet connection provides, the internet connection you paid for. There’s an information buffet. You take as much of it as you like, one price.

The internet service providers, many of who also provide cable television access, were okay with this until Netflix and Hulu started providing services that competed with their content. Then they started wanting to charge Netflix extra, extorting extra money for the service they already provided.

This went to court. The possibilities of a world where different internet traffic is delivered at different speeds sparked concerned among the huge portion of America that has come to rely upon the internet both for business and for information, as well as for entertainment. The solution from the previous administration was to treat internet traffic like phone conversations, so called “common carrier” rules. You pay for a pipe. Everything that comes through the pipe has to be treated equally.

The ISP’s paint this as killing innovation. The only innovation that it seems to affect, though, is you paying more for the same services and websites you’re already using.

A former lawyer for Verizon, one of those internet service providers, now sits as the head of the FCC. He’s guy on the city council in our story above. He wants to end those protections, replacing them with a pledge for transparent business practices and grievances dealt with through the Federal Trade Commission. He argues that treating all traffic equally is a burdensome regulation.

He’s arguing that making people who pay for the buffet eat anything on the buffet for the agreed upon price is stifling progress. That’s his argument.

The world after Net Neutrality, should it come to pass, might not look very different at first. What we could see, though, is that some sites are blocked or artificially limited by your provider unless you pay extra. Or they will push their own products, services offered to a captive audience, while denying you the option of using the services already provided (Like Amazon? Then you’re going to love Comcast Marketplace! Like Twitter? Then you’re going to love AOL Instant Messenger 2! Like crab legs? Then you’re going to love imitation crab sticks!).

Never mind the fact that most people, especially people in rural areas, don’t have options for who provides their internet connection. Their choice is take what’s available or drive to the library, not that the library will be immune to such artificial and stifling limits. Also never mind that internet speeds in other countries dwarf ours already; the technology to improve already exists, there’s just no pressure to improve rather than make money off of that to which we have grown accustomed.

The other argument is that the cable companies own the lines, so they should be able to do as they like with them. Of course tax dollars through subsidies helped pay for those lines so we could have a robust and open internet. That’s where the analogy with the buffet stops; not a lot of restaurants are built on government subsidy, I don’t think.

This is an issue that effects all of us. Sites like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and pretty much every cornerstone of modern commerce and information consumption started out as a small project that grew into a giant. Without Net Neutrality, the next big idea could be priced into non-existence.

And this is not even considering that leaving control of the content of the internet to the ISP’s opens the door for corporate censorship. Do you think Comcast is going to let you see Yelp’s reviews of Comcast’s bad reviews? Or that Time Warner might let you have access to informed arguments against their acquisitions and mergers?

Do we want a world where the keys are in the hands of entities that have no duty but to generate profit for their shareholders? Has that ever turned out well?

If you have ever used the internet or frequent a business that uses it, this matters to you. If you use a smartphone, this matters. If you think articles like this should not be censored by internet service providers, this matters. Keeping the internet under Title II protections is the best measure we have right now to keep a level playing field for innovators, a fair price for consumers, and information for all.

Demand Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality is the critical 1st Amendment issue of the 21st century. Text RESIST to 50409 to tell your representatives or Senators what you think about this or any other issue before Congress. If you’d rather use Facebook Messenger, click here and say RESIST to contact your government. Tell them what you use the internet for and that you don’t fast lanes. Tell them that Net Neutrality is important to you and you want it preserved. And do it today, because in 3 weeks, it might go away.

Or, you know, you could try to get used to the imitation crab. Until they change that, too.