Access? That went out with free internet.

I am embarrassed to say that when I first heard the term “net neutrality” I honestly thought it meant that people just had to start getting along on the web. Now of course my opinion has vastly changed on this, and I find myself wondering why I wasn’t aware of it in the first place, or why many people aren’t to this day.

Net-neutrality is a debate that is slowly gaining more and more light in the public and possibly showing the beginnings of massive change for the internet and our technological engineering. For those of you who are still in the dark about net-neutrality, in a nutshell it is corporations stepping in to monitor and charge for use of the internet. Neutrality isn’t really the issue right now; the issue is trying to keep it neutral.

How many times do you use the internet in a day? Whether it’s to check up on Facebook or Twitter, check your email, look at a school site, research an essay, download music. We literally cannot count how many web-pages we use in a day. Now imagine if you were charged every time you needed to look something up. As if school doesn’t cost enough as it is, these corporations are going to ask to pay them to visit sites for school. On top of that, what would happen if a corporation controlled what you were allowed to view in a day, month or year? Now I’m not talking about them pulling videos off of Youtube, I’m talking about limiting your bandwidth (your ability to load, upload, and pretty much do everything). What if a company could tell you that you were listening to too much Billy Talent, and they cut you off? That is the issue that is net-neutrality.

I believe that the heart of the outrage lies in the fact that corporations think they have some errant claim over the internet, when in fact they had nothing in the least to do with its invention. Bell and Rogers did not create the internet, but they are sure going to attempt to turn a profit by bleeding everyone dry for it.

Works Cited

“FAQ: Net Neutrality and Internet Traffic Management.” CBC News. Oct. 19, 2009. Web. Nov. 20, 2009.