The Absence of Neutrality Can Lead To Business Degradation
Imagine yourself, getting on Google for a quick search on the latest news. Suddenly, a little message pops up in front of the homepage of the Google search. You read the message, which was sent by your Internet provider. It says: “You have run out of free searches on Google. Please pay $5.99 for 20 additional searches.” This is what would happen if there was no net neutrality.
‘What is net neutrality?’ you may ask. According to UC Berkeley, the essential meaning of net neutrality is, that all internet traffic is equal, no matter what kind of traffic, or whoever accesses the traffic.
Let me give you a small example to help you visualize this issue better. Let’s say you have two Internet Service Providers (ISP) like AT&T, Bell, or other companies that specialize in providing Internet services: ISP 1 and ISP 2.
You use ISP 1, and you want to access ISP 2’s website to see if they have better deals than ISP 1. What ISP 1 will do is that they will use various dirty methods to disable or to make ISP 2’s website longer to load, resulting in you and many other users like you getting irritated (read: downright peeved and irked) so your standard of ISP 2 will degrade. Meanwhile, ISP 1’s website will have the easiest, fastest loading speed ever, making ISP 1’s users (like you, in this scenario) increase your standards for ISP 1. The reality is that, if there was no net neutrality, ISP 1 could do anything to your traffic — such as throttle, drop packets, redirect, slow down, etc.
As you can see from the example here, this kind of treatment is unfair to everyone, users and companies alike. Entire companies have sunk into the dark abyss of non-existence like the Titanic because of the unjust treatment is given by ISP’s. Net neutrality abolishes that by taking away bias and making everything equal for people, by the people.
With the US government rethinking many years of innovation-oriented net neutrality policies and FCC’s newly Trump-appointed chairman Ajit Pai basically “undoing net neutrality”, comes a new era of protest and a reflection of the Internet’s freedom since its commercialization in the early ‘90s.
What I’m trying to say is, no net neutrality can lead to the extinction of many startups, and the possibility of big ISP companies ruling the Internet — and the government.
Startups rely on the Internet to promote their business, connect with other people, and to create markets. This can lead to better products, real competition, and the creation of jobs. If telecom companies had no net neutrality policies blocking them down, then these companies can charge some other big tech companies with higher prices to give them “fast lanes”. These tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Twitter and many more can pay a premium to the telecom businesses to give the company larger bandwidths and faster connections to the telecom companies users. This would promote their business and eliminate their competitors.
This, in turn, can degrade other industries through a ripple effect. IoT’s (Internet of Things) main benefits (remote access and cloud computing) can be hindered by the degradation of Net Neutrality. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can also be affected greatly by the absence of net neutrality, with less transactions online and more transactions in big banks.
Don’t believe me? Well, let’s look at this example here:
When Netflix was negotiating terms with Comcast, beginning in October of 2013, the download speed of the famous movie streaming service went down significantly. When they finished the negotiations, in February of 2014, Netflix’s download rates went rocketing up to a 45% increase in download speeds. Like Netflix, this can happen (and will happen) to many start-ups if net neutrality does not exist.
As you can see here, it is evident that no net neutrality is a huge problem in today’s world. We, the netizens, need to address this issue through movements and bringing awareness to others. This is one of the many problems where the corporation and the community can join hand-in-hand — in this case, to stop ISP’s from taking our freedom on the Internet. Do you wish to browse freely, or to be continuously monitored by your ISP? I know for sure that I would take the former.
Sources:
- https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/19/these-are-the-arguments-against-net-neutrality-and-why-theyre-wrong/
- https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~raylin/whatisnetneutrality.htm
- http://thehill.com/policy/technology/331012-what-killing-net-neutrality-means-for-the-internet
- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fcc-chair-ajit-pai-explains-wants-scrap-net-neutrality/
- https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-comcast-to-end-slowdown/
