I’m sure you’ve heard of net neutrality before, but do you know how it affects you?
The world without net neutrality would look a bit like this. Net neutrality is defined as:
“Internet service providers may not discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online. It guarantees a level playing field for all Web sites and Internet technologies.”
What Internet providers (Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, etc.) want to do is “tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. And they want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking services offered by their competitors.”
While the Internet providers would make an enormous amount of money from this, they would completely murder the innovation of the Internet. Everything you have ever known about the Internet, what some of you have grown up on, will be completely gone. What you know of the Internet now, the speed, the websites, the applications could cost 5 to 10 times what you are paying now if net neutrality is stopped.
Senator Al Franken recently said net neutrality is the “first amendment issue of our time”, and it is. Any of you could start a blog, and send out your opinion to the billions of Internet users across the world. If Net Neutrality wasn’t around my site would be obsolete. The only people who could visit would either have to pay extra, or my site would load incredibly slow. The Internet is our generations’ contribution to the future of the human species. Just imagine if only a handful of companies had control of where, when and how we used fire. Net Neutrality needs to be preserved forever, it matters to you whether you like it or not. [Via]