So, some of you "old" (over 35) people out there may have heard of this thing called net neutrality, and be wondering what the big deal is. Or you may not have heard of it all, and were just directed to read this by a concerned child/grandchild/newphew/niece (though this last option is unlikely at best). Either way, its something thats important for you to know.
When you attempt to read a blog, check your email, or watch a video on youtube, your request gets chopped up into little packets and sent out into the world. From your computer they first travel to your Internet Service Provider (or ISP, examples are Comcast, Verizon, Green Mountain Access, Earthlink....whoever you pay your Internet bill to). From there, your ISP tries to figure out a nice short path across their own network (very much like a set of intersecting roads), for your packets to reach their destination with no blockages. Usually this will involve leaving their network, and sending the packets onto another ISP's network. In a fair world (i.e. one where "network neutrality" is observed), packets get sent on to their next destination as fairly as possibly....in the order they are received. Unfortunately, sometimes the networks get too much traffic (for example, when lots of people are using youtube, or bittorrent, or other audio-visual sorts of things), and begin to get clogged - kinda like a traffic jam. When this happens, everyone using that network begins to experience the speed of their Internet connection dropping. Many ISP's are now lobbying to be able to use "Traffic Shaping Software" to prioritize certai types of traffic, and redirect (or even stop!) other types of traffic. While they advertise that this would only ever be used to improve the quality of their service, the sad truth is that once ISP's are allowed to shape traffic, they can shape it however they want. This opens up several disturbing possibilities. The most obvious one is that it would allow them to begin charging for tiered service, where they slow track all your traffic unless you pay them extra money for "premium service." More troublesome yet, is that they could do the same thing for web services that you want to use. A hypothetical example of this would be if Yahoo or Microsoft formed a partnership with a local ISP, and paid them to slow down traffic to and from Google. Every with that ISP would find Google to be unusably (or at least inconveniently) slow, and people would switch to Microsoft and Yahoo, drawing revenue away from Google. While Google is a fairly large company, the same sort of tactics could easily be used to effectively squelch new competition from starting up. The final, and most serious, issue is that traffic shaping software can be used to entirely block certain applications (as is already happening in many places with BitTorrent), or even to censor webpages that aren't in the best interest of the ISP or big telecom companies.
For further information, or to learn how you can help protect your Internet freedoms, please consider the following resources.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
http://www.eff.org/
thank you for reading this!
~Thomas
