As someone that aspires to be an entrepreneur, Net Neutrality is absolutely critical to my future. Without net neutrality it will become more and more difficult for small companies to grow and will become much easier for larger companies to leverage their size to bully out their competitors.
According to the FCC net neutrality says: “A person engaged in the provision of broadband internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.” This basically means that the companies are not allowed to throttle traffic to users and make companies pay for priority. However, as Netflix has argued, the order does not place the same restrictions on connection points which could lead to the throttling occurring there rather than at the end before the user.
The argument for net neutrality deals with cost and innovation. It is expensive to be an internet service provider and companies such as Netflix take a huge amount of the network up. The sunk cost of building the network could mean that it is hard to make money with broadband hogs like Netflix or Hulu about. The argument also deals with innovation. If the ISP’s do not have incentives to grow and build the network that come from the ability to throttle the network and use their power to have companies pay them for faster speed, there could be millions of jobs that are lost.
I firmly am on the side for net neutrality. While having the government regulate the ISP’s in this manner may mean the loss of millions of jobs and less innovation in the industry, I believe that net neutrality is critical to the growth of new companies and entrepreneurship. Without net neutrality it could become too expensive for startups to negotiate and pay the ISP’s to not bottleneck the network when accessing their sites and data.
I personally believe that access to the internet should be considered a basic legal right of all Americans. The internet is the library of the future and the amount of information and teaching it provides is extremely important. This coincides with my decision to support net neutrality and have no artificial bottlenecks be made in the system.
As I support net neutrality and believe that access to the internet should be a basic right, I think that the internet service providers should be treated like other utilities and monitored like a utility. There is already existing infrastructure in place that could be used as a backbone for this monitoring body. While this may have a small inverse impact on innovation, I believe that impact is a small price to pay in order to allow better access to the internet for all users.
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