Net-Indonesia-Neutrality
With yet long gone and kind of ancient topic of net neutrality I remember Ajit Pai. Because how the hell comical figure like Ajit Pai can be the chairman of the FCC? By the power of Trump right? He is not cool, he is not up to date, he doesn’t understand what internet is like and so on. But again he is the chairman of the FCC. That’s a little bit weird. I’m not going to talk about American net neutrality, I’m not American and I don’t live there. But it is intriguing for me to talk about it, because I never heard of it before and I don’t think other people have talked about it in the media. Those above in the case of that I live in Indonesia. What is net neutrality exactly?
On the Wikipedia, net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers must treat all data on the internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication. Rather simplistic way of saying something. But that’s the way they put it. And then I watch a Youtube video by Ben Shapiro on The Daily Wire channel, and he explained that you need to see internet as utility to understand about net neutrality. He’s right winger, so he is against net neutrality but watch the video to understand what net neutrality is all about.
First to understand it, you need to see internet as utility, in this case see internet as water. So the argument is like this, to access water you need to have piping, like you need someone to build infrastructure to access that water. Then see ISP as piping company. Get it? Net neutrality under Obama is a suggestion that ISP need to provide the same resource capacity to load everything on the internet, like Netflix should be loaded as the same resource capacity as Google and that’s not fair for ISP because Netflix need more resource to load. So they abolished net neutrality so that ISP can charge whatever is fair to load Netflix. See? Weird right? If you think it in different way, as piping company, basically they want it like this. “Oh you want to shower? That’s $50 a month, if you want to do laundry as well you need to pay $100 more, cause I will run different pipe for that”. That’s idiotic. Bare minimum, idiotic. You see, internet doesn’t work like that. Internet works in one single pipe called bandwidth. It works basically like water inside a pipe, if you use the pipe on its maximum capacity, the volume will be constant every second. So if you have 100Mbps bandwidth you can pull off 100Mbps on its maximum capacity. That’s how internet works.
My argument is like this, I see the same idea of internet with Ben, it is a utility. Like electricity or water. It is something that you need to provide access to it, I mean you can provide the internet yourself without ISP if you want to. You can buy your own hardware and stuff. It’s not cheap, I think you need to provide your own satellite for that matter. In that case of freedom, I think the utility provider need to shut the fuck up. Because I can do it myself if I want to so if you only provide access, just give me the access, I want this much access to the utility and I will pay that much money you want to charge me. Then after I get the access leave me alone. I will use it to watch porn, or I will use it to get a scholarship in MIT, or something else, that’s my problem. Electricity provider will never say you can’t use this or that much resource for your oven or fridge, you pay the price you get to do whatever you like with your electricity.
In my own country, Indonesia, net neutrality doesn’t exist. ISPs lie to us Indonesian everyday. Like for example, on the ads, “60Gb for 30 days (Rp. 100k)” then you buy it, turns out 10Gb only usable after 12am, 20Gb only usable to watch movie on HOOQ, and another 10Gb only usable inside the city where the package bought. The only resource I get, dedicated for this issue called www.internetnetral.com is like yeah, alright. Doesn’t cut it though. I mean I get it, you will not die without internet. It sucks but it doesn’t really matter. There will be no riot knowing there is no law regulating neutrality of it. www.internetnetral.com thanks for trying! The thing is simple, for me at least. Indonesia as a nation is still in the long haul understanding freedom of doing something, when unmarried couple living together still a bigger problem than your likelihood to access unlimited information about stuff that might be giving you hope to better yourself, net neutrality will be as important as my opinion towards it.
