High-speed Internet is business on cocaine, and business is booming.
Shoot your friends in an online multiplayer game! Watch men light themselves on fire! Charge perverts three dollars a minute to watch you lift a refrigerator while wearing a bikini! Slander a peer, or insult a stranger! The Internet is a place where dreams come true.
The Internet killed a man. He played Starcraft so long that he collapsed; a victim of sleep deprivation, malnourishment and stupidity. These are principles the Internet thrives on.
But wait – the Internet isn’t all bad! It helps pimply couch potatoes to find the loves of their pathologically antisocial, agoraphobic lives. It even helps cancer researchers play a quick match of Tetris during their lunch break. So shouldn’t the needs of many outweigh the greed of a few?
Net neutrality is the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should provide equal service to all of their customers, regardless of content accessed. Net neutrality prevents large corporations from spending vast sums of money in order to get priority on their data.
The bigger ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon and AOL want to give faster and better service to Web sites that pay them for special treatment. That special treatment could harm smaller sites that can’t or won’t pay up. But who does this really affect?
“The broadband providers aren’t investing in the infrastructure to provide service to rural America, or lower income America,” said Scott Adamson, director of networks at Guilford College. “The Internet was designed as a stupid network; just to transfer data, not to care what it was.” Adamson knows what network activity looks like. He’s concerned about the benefits that legislation can and may provide, and who’s going to benefit from it.
The most popular corporate-backed content, like pornography or major news network pages, will load like lightning. Your favorite Web site about ninjas, pirates or vegan activism, on the other hand, will load slower than Lance Armstrong on a bike with no wheels.
Another danger that lurks in the Net-neutrality debate is what kind of access the government will have, and what they’ll be able to do with it.
You might be thinking the only people who will be affected are computer-geeks with no social life and a terminal case of acne. You might be thinking that MySpace girl over there can just go ahead and wait for her anime to load, and she shouldn’t be crying to congress about her blog entries coming up a little slower. You might need to see it from a different perspective.
Slow Internet is to nerds as a kick to the groin is to genitalia – nothing hurts geeks more, except perhaps public speaking or football players. Nerds hate slow service because packets of data are dropped, like a ball in the hands of a drunken wide receiver. A whole Web page will stop loading if only a few packets are dropped.
Not only nerds care about media – virtually everyone in America has an addiction to it, and the Internet is where it spreads fastest. Net neutrality addresses a much larger issue: freedom, education and access to media in our digital world.
Think of net neutrality as the high-tech counterpart to freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights. Same principle. Different scenario.
Thousands of issues are more humane and more pressing than net neutrality. The majority of people on Earth have no access to the Internet, let alone high-speed access. The issue at stake isn’t just Internet freedom, the issue is social conscience.
No one should let private interests impact the public’s free access to information, and whether it’s a bunch of dropped ones and zeros or a burned book, it’s all the same issue of access. Congress is deciding on this issue now, so if you want to get involved, it’s best not to waste any more time on Facebook. For more information, use the Internet while you still can.