Net Neutrality

First things first, what makes businesses profitable is the fact that companies pay their marketing teams tons of money to make their product or service appeal to the public more than the competitor’s, even if it isn’t actually better at all. If they were not able to do that, the best overall product would be known and we as the consumer would pay hefty for it.

That being said, this petition argues for something they call “net neutrality” where they could forbid internet service providers from favoring their content or services over another provider’s. How does that make sense? What if someone told Skippy that they could not try and convince their costumer base that their peanut butter was indeed better than Peter Pan?

That is exactly what they are calling for, but I do not agree with it. The petition says that ISPs should not be able to prefer anything of their own over another provider’s, but isn’t all provider’s services available on the internet anyway? If you don’t like what you’re being shown on a website, you can visit another site. In fact, if you don’t like what you’re seeing on your current ISP, you have the ability to switch your service to another one; not as quickly as you can switch sites, but you get the idea.

Critics characterized net neutrality regulation as “a solution in search of a problem”, arguing that broadband service providers have no plans to block content or degrade network performance. If it could be proved that private ISPs were blocking content, applications, or anything else from their users because it originated from a competitor then I would be all for the idea. However, no cases have been proved.

Bob Kahn, Internet Protocol’s co-inventor, is against the idea of “net neutrality” saying that “nothing interesting can happen inside the net” if it passes. If we want internet innovation to spread in the future, a net neutrality goal is not something worth pursuing.

The idea of ”net neutrality” is a good one, in theory. In real life, you need competition to keep prices low for the consumer and to breed innovation within the dynamic, in this case ISPs. If one cannot prefer their content over another, then consumers would not be aware of what else is out there. And eventually, there wouldn’t be anything else out there.

A. Martin