Buffering: Why is Net Neutrality important?

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The Internet is more than likely to be one of the most iconic assets to our modern society. It’s a place for being social, entertainment, debates, playing games, and more information than you need to know. Most people reading this article right now can relate. This article is on a website, right? Imagine if a person couldn’t even read this article because an Internet provider slowed their Internet speed down to the point where this page couldn’t load up. Some major companies that provide an Internet connection to many people are attempting to remove the policy commonly known as ‘net neutrality.’ Net neutrality is the idea and current law that everyone gets the Internet speeds they are paying for. These major companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable are planning on raising those prices if net neutrality were to be appealed.

Net neutrality, like said before, is a current law in the United States. The law makes Internet companies make sure that their customers get the Internet speeds they are paying for. If a person pays for high-speed Internet, they get high-speed Internet. If they pay for slow-speed Internet, they get slow-speed Internet. If net neutrality were removed, this would allow cable companies to charge customers more money for the same speeds. Not only would this cause higher internet prices, but if net neutrality were removed and a person could not afford to pay for all of the payment, the company providing their Internet would be allowed to slow down the person’s internet connection. For example, a person could be paying for an Internet speed that is at the average speed of Internet providers in the US. Net neutrality is removed, and they suddenly can’t afford the bill they have been given. Hypothetically, the person pays a decent amount of it, but they don’t completely pay off the Internet bill. Now, the company providing their Internet connection would be allowed to change their Internet speed to an incredibly slow speed. Some files could already take a half-hour to download, but imagine if that file would now take two hours to download instead.

Several celebrities on the Internet and TV are trying to spread the word about net neutrality, and many have succeeded. For example, John Oliver’s broadcast of the net neutrality debate on Last Week Tonight about eight months ago drew lots of attention. How much attention? So much attention that when the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) was taking comments on their website about net neutrality, and shortly after the show aired the website crashed from high amounts of traffic. Another person who commented about net neutrality was a popular gaming critic on YouTube named John Bain, who is often referred to as TotalBiscuit. In his video, he seems to explain net neutrality in a way people can easily understand. “It’s like saying, ‘Well, the speed limit for cars right now is seventy miles per hour, but if you pay for this fast lane you can drive in it at seventy miles per hour. Everybody else has to drive in the slow lane at thirty miles per hour,” John Bain explained in his video. You can watch the video he made using this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz4Ej3IVefo

        Not only are celebrities and Internet stars coming into contact with net neutrality, but even our own US president is taking a stance on protecting net neutrality. President Barack Obama has made it clear that he would be taking a stance to make sure net neutrality remains a US law. “No service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane’ because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth,” President Obama said in his White House address. You can find this address at http://www.whitehouse.gov/net-neutrality.

Not many people really want to pay more to receive the same services they had already. It seems more like a waste of money rather than a better service, and that’s what cable companies are claiming to do when they really aren’t. Luckily, the Internet isn’t that idiotic to believe that Internet powerhouses like Time Warner Cable and Comcast are attempting to improve their already poor customer services by removing some of the protection laws of the Internet.

Not only will big cable companies charge their customers more for not paying their fees, but they’ll even charge the providers of content itself. These cable companies would attempt to start making major social and entertainment websites to pay extra fees to get ‘more reliable speed’, or at least that’s what they say. If websites like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube don’t pay up the bills, their servers that allow us to even get on the website could become worse. Why is that bad? These are all major websites, receiving a massive amount of traffic almost all of the time. If the reliability of their servers were to suddenly plummet, there would be increased downtimes on these websites from this high amount of traffic. Reiterated from John Bain, the worst case would be that a website becomes so slow that the page itself doesn’t even load, which can easily be brought towards a debate where these poor Internet speeds are actually censoring the websites content. This can also be argued to be going against the First Amendment of the Constitution.

It’s hard to imagine the idea of a free and open Internet without mentioning net neutrality. Net neutrality is more than likely one of the biggest reasons that the Internet is such a powerhouse in our current generation. Now, people need to make sure that one of the greatest innovations of our current era will remain the way it should be. These cable companies cannot allow themselves to revoke our freedom on the Internet, and they cannot dictate what people can and can’t do just because they cannot pay the extra cash. The vote for net neutrality will occur on February 26, 2015, which is around two weeks from now. People need to make sure that they use those days to preserve our rights on the Internet and save the wireless giant that connects our vast world together.