Our View: Neutrality should be upheld

While it might not be the biggest thing on our readers’ radar, they do have a stake in the intensifying discussions about net neutrality.

So far, there’s a lot that has been said about net neutrality, a lot of which isn’t necessarily true. For example. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called net neutrality “Obamacare for the Internet.” He’s completely wrong, though it’s not surpassing to see someone who gets campaign money from telecommunications companies to come out against it.

What net neutrality is, is how the internet operates now. Access to websites are given equal priority by internet service providers, regardless of if those sites compete with the internet service provider’s businesses or not. People are free to use whatever websites they see fit, if they choose Google over Yahoo for their search engine, Fox News over CNN, Barnes and Noble over Amazon.

The future of net neutrality came into questions when an appeals court threw out rules the Federal Communications Commission had set up that required telecommunications companies to treat all traffic equally. They were thrown out not because they were unconstitutional or illegal, but because the FCC had taken the wrong route to create the rules.

Without net neutrality, our experience on the internet could be vastly different. Internet service providers could throttle speeds to particular websites in order to drive traffic to their faster-loading websites. An internet provider cold also force a company to pay higher fees to maintain the speed of their service. This has already happened between Netflix and Comcast, where Comcast demanded Netflix to pay more for access to Comcast customers. During these negotiations, Comcast allowed video from Netflix to degrade until Netflix agreed to pay Comcast.

Moving beyond that, it isn’t hard to think of an internet service provider which creates its own services and forces its customers through broadband manipulation to use those services.

Many customers are forced to purchase their internet access from one company or another, because of how the telecommunications industry has merged into a handful of giants. As a result, most cannot get alternate access to the internet and competition is stifled.

Ultimately, the only losers in this are us. Without net neutrality, we would be at the mercy of internet service providers eager to exploit their customers for their corporate gains. We would be losing out on a resource that truly should be treated as a utility, without bias or corporate interest and stretches beyond mere commerce.