Net Neutrality or the Opposite?
Network neutrality is a concept that would require broadband/telecom providers maintain equal service for all customers and not be allowed to restrict or segregate services based on the content those customers provide.
Recently, the FCC has kind of stepped back in the discussions leaving the private entities to decide what to do. Google and Verizon have released a statement indicating their plans to have an open internet while creating a second private internet or premium broadband service.
This is really disturbing in my mind, let’s say you want to access sites like YouTube, FaceBook or maybe play World of WarCraft or Halo but in order to do that you have to pay an extra fee to your internet provider (Mediacom, Qwest, Verizon, Comcast, etc) in order to access that “premium” internet. Is that fair? The telecom companies state that these services use a lot of their bandwidth. Well, I don’t know about you, but when I pay for a service and I’m told I can use X amount of it, and I do, shouldn’t that be OK? That’s like the Satellite company charging you for watching your TV “too long”. I’m not one for regulation, I think the Government has their hands in too much already, however this might be an area where its OK. This could really cause some problems and make things very expensive, all so some very large companies can charge even more.
What happens when everything is using lots of bandwidth, the most popular sites and services are going to consume a mass amount of bandwidth, now you’ll end up paying for services you don’t right now and for those that you do, you could end up paying more!
We want your thoughts!
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Brad
I wonder how they would be able to police this? Would my ISP warn me before I visit a premium site? And taking the nature of the internet in to consideration, what happens when a new site comes on the scene that gains sudden popularity? At what point does something that was free become premium? Also, I wonder how sites like youtube (that rely on advertising) will feel about ISPs essentially reducing their traffic by adding a cover charge to get in. Seems odd that an ISP can profit off of another sites popularity.
Jason Howell
From what I’ve read, it would be a whole separate level of service you would subscribe to. You’d have to actually have a monthly service charge in order to access those areas. I don’t see much good coming out of this.