Net Neutrality

By On May 15, 2006 · Leave a Comment · In Internet, Politics

I don’t know if many people are really familiar with this term yet, but Net Neutrality is essentially the reason that the Internet is currently the free place that we know and love. To put it simply, net neutrality forbids your ISP from restricting what you access. They can’t say you can’t access a certain website or something similar just because they don’t like it or, worse off, that website didn’t pay them some sort of fee. All data gets an equal share with net neutrality.

Here’s where it gets nasty: The major telecom companies and a decent chunk of congress are looking to pass an act called the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE). COPE demolishes net neutrality within the US. With the COPE act, whoever your internet service provider is would be allowed to charge fees to webhosts/websites to allow access. Say, for example, that your ISP is contacted with MSN and not Yahoo, but you prefer Yahoo. Because Yahoo didn’t pay your ISP their fee, it would be perfectly legal for them to lower data transmission priority to Yahoo, which means you might have trouble accessing Yahoo, you might not be able to access it at all, or it might even route you automatically to MSN. Pretty disturbing, right? Well, it gets worse. What if your bank and/or credit card company doesn’t pay a fee to your ISP? Or you use a certain site to get severe weather alerts and they don’t pay the fee? Worse yet, what if you need to find the nearest hospital, but the one that’s around the corner that you don’t know about isn’t on your ISP’s approved list? It even goes beyond just the web. Access can easily be restricted to certain chat rooms, or you might not get emails from friends because they use a competitor’s internet service.

Are you disgusted with the telecom companies and certain (primarily Republican) members of the Congress yet? I am.

Here’s what you can do about it:

SaveTheInternet.com – Sign their petition!
House of Representatives – Contact your congressman!
Declare Yourself – Elect someone who will fight for net neutrality!