A Word on Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality seems to have been causing such an impressive amount of fear in our society and that fear (which I share) is that we will have to pay more for the services that we cannot live without such as Netflix, HBOGO, Hulu, and Amazon Prime so that our streaming will be faster and better (because the “buffering “ wheel is one of our many first world fears). I think that Net Neutrality is necessary for new companies to emerge and for these services to keep being as popular as the they are. If net neutrality stopped working, the competition for better service would feel the pockets of the main distributing corporations, leaving behind smaller service enterprises, and also leaving behind less successful streaming agencies. All of this would lead to great surge in the prices of the main services and the complete failure of start-up companies.
If the main focus is to capitalize even more the Television industry and separate our society even more drastically, ending the concept of net neutrality would be the best option. On the other hand, if the main focus is to make entertainment easy for most classes of our society, we need net neutrality. The New York Times had a great way to explain how Net Neutrality works (http://www.nytimes.com/video/technology/100000002881329/how-net-neutrality-works.html) and I can see it all as very obvious things; the capitalist world we live in, the increasing competition for better service and the consequences on consumerism, and the need to acquire the best entertainment provider. All of these things connected cause our need to have those streaming services bigger than some of our basic needs, which leads the capitalist society to find a way to get more money from our needs, which leads to companies wanting to make more money in order to survive (which in this case means to be able to compete for attention).
In the NYTimes video they explain that net neutrality would prevent companies from paying more in order to have a faster service than others. In the same way that my Amazon Prime account allows me to have a prioritized two-day shipping because I pay a certain amount of money each year, each website would be able to become “prime” in the eyes of our internet providers. That means that it is actually possible for every order to have two-day shipping, but if we can separate them into a paying category and non-paying category and the best we can do is indeed a two-day shipping, we need to make the non-payers lose that right. And that is exactly my fear with the lack of net neutrality in the next few years. It will only become another way to extract more money from people for things that were once available for all already paying customers.
Our lives are now based on the internet world; the amount of cybernetic tools we know how to use may help us or stop us from getting a job, the ability to access services such as the streaming ones mentioned above can get us into the in-group or part us from many of our friends at work and at home, the speed in which we can access, download, and upload information can help us make it before the deadline or push us over the limit time. We are so dependent on internet services that in a little over 20 years we were able to turn industrial-sized machines that were mainly used for accounting and storage into little pocket sized machines that have GPS and three different ways to access the internet and communicate. My first cell phone was given to me by my parents to help keep me safe, helping us stay in contact when I went home with the School bus, my last cell phone was bought by me because my need to have so many apps that will “keep me safe” by helping me know my location, the train times, the police alerts, weather announcements, and overall the fastest news source we have nowadays — a network that can connect the entire world in milliseconds — overcame my need to have a phone battery life that lasted all day. I, then, decided that I needed to switch my perfectly fine phone by a newer version with more gigabytes.
Net neutrality means that the services we are paying for now are indeed profiting on our expenses, but that each service’s profit is simply each service’s profit, and that it doesn’t rollover the big company that they are having to pay to distribute their own services. Net neutrality is able to avoid monopoly. In the sense that monopoly means one corporation having control over all others with similar or related services, net neutrality makes it impossible for that one corporation to take advantage of that. If Internet Service Company 1 offered lower prices than ISC 2 in order to provide faster service, most websites would choose ISC1 in order to save money and keep their clients, leaving ISC 2 behind to its demise. Also, the websites that are already established and that are able to pay for a faster service will be prioritized by those companies, making it harder for other companies to grow and, also, leading them to the start-up company graveyard.
I can honestly say that not having net neutrality can and will change the world drastically in the next few years. The fact that half of our society will probably not be able to afford those services anymore if that happens means that this half will have to learn how to live without the internet again. Right now I know it sounds impossible, but after some really rough times that could teach us how to survive and entertain ourselves when our batteries die, they would probably be better off and be more likely to succeed in a dystopian future society. Although, for the years in which we will lose the power that is now in our fingertips and still suffer from it, we will have to sacrifice better products in order to have the most expensive (and therefore faster) product. If Apple co. has more money than Google, the Safari based “Maps” app will be faster than Google Maps and therefore more wanted, even though Google Maps can offer things such as biking and public transportation times and plans that “Maps” cannot.
I am completely pro net neutrality for my fear of losing all the things I have become so dependent on. I am dependent on Skype in order to see my family who is 12-hours in a flight away from me, I am dependent on Facebook in order to see how my cousins look like and how their lives are changing, I am dependent on all social media in order to have access to actual pictures of the people I love. I am also dependent on watching the latest Game of Thrones in less than 48 hours from its airing time in order to keep up with my friends, I am dependent on online shopping in order to find things for a price that I can afford and without needing a car to reach a determined store, I am dependent on the internet to find information and critiques on restaurants and house services, and I am even dependent on “Sparksnotes” in order to keep up with a class that I am not giving the demanded attention to. The sense of the world dependent here is not used in the sense “I need this in order to survive, therefore i am dependent on it” but in the sense that “in order for me to fit in society and be a part of it, I am dependent on it”.
Not having net neutrality would only aid to many problems that our society already has in the foreseeable future, and not going with it would be robbing us from our right to have them. It would be silly to move forward with something that has cause such a stir in our society already instead of listening to our needs and trying to fix it. John Oliver is right when he freaks out about how terrified we are of not being able to watch a movie without it having to buffer mid-way.
