If you value a free Internet, you need to support net neutrality. Net neutrality means that the Internet is neutral – any company, of any size, can get on there and offer their service to anyone. Of course, this gives rise to companies like You Tube and Skype that offers us free Internet versions of services that we usually pay for, so the big phone and cable companies are hacked off. Someone else is making money that they want.
What the big 5 phone and cable companies are proposing is a two-tired Internet system. Companies that pay the Big 5 a hefty sum of money will be able to still offer their sites over broadband. Those that don’t (or can’t afford to) will be relegated to the dirt roads of dial-up speeds. Note that this doesn’t matter what you the end user is paying for. Even if you are paying for “high speed” Internet, you still may try to go to a site on the lower tier access, and your connection will slow down massively.
The more than likely scenario is that smaller companies will be faced with going out of business, or passing on the benefit of being on the high speed tier on to you. Which means you would have to pay for broadband over and over and over again (each time you hit a site that had to jack up prices in order to stay in business). This also means that companies like YouTube – that started out in someone’s garage – could never take off.
The Big 5 try to tell us that they have First Amendment right to enforce this system, or that they put up the wires, so it’s “evil” for Internet based companies to use them for free to steal money away from them. Which, of course, anyone with a brain knows that no one technically uses the Internet for free. And, of course, we all know that this issue really nothing to do with religion, freedom of speech, assembly, or petitioning the government. What it really comes down to is this: companies like Skype, Vonage, YouTube, etc came up with ways to make money off of what they do, and the Big 5 were too slow and/or stupid to change business models to get a piece of this profit. So now they want to be greedy.
