The internet changes the lives of millions of people a day, possibly making it the biggest influence in the world, over that of television networks. People use the network to share information, chat with friends, manage business contracts and any other activity you can imagine. The audience of this communication network is not static or unresponsive like previous networks of newspapers or television broadcasts has commonly been. Unlike all previous networks, the internet allows for one great innovation: feedback. This property of allowing users to respond and converse about a subject, in that subject's own community has had a great impact on how people get information and news in their daily lives.
People have the idea that their access to this information is unlimited, that nobody can change or alter it for another individuals benefit. This is where people coin the term Net Neutrality. It is the practice of treating information on a network neutrally, regardless of intent, content or accuracy. The intent of this posting is to explain the advantages to enforcing strict network neutrality. Failure to enforce it will lead to oppression of minorities, suspension of basic communicative rights and potentially spread corruption in the leadership of broadcast systems.
The internet lacks infinite resources some people have come to believe it has. There are vast systems dedicated to directing traffic on it. This is where Alaskan senator Ted Stevens came up with a popular analogy, a "series of tubes". Stevens created this analogy from the simple fact that when a person sends information to another person through the internet. It uses a virtual data pipe to send the information. This in turn sends the information through a true data system that as the analogy implies has limits.
It is important to realize the relevance this had to the senator, this idea is why he rejected a bill amendment that would have prohibited Internet Service Providers (ISP's) from charging to give customers higher priority access to information websites. This senator's plan backfired though, the term "a series of tubes" is being used by the community that is for network neutrality. Not without reason either, the idea that the "tubes" could be blocked up with information is a fallacy.
In common network implementations, a sudden load of information does not commonly lead to data loss, only an information delay. This delay is commonly misinterpreted, the extra load will not lead to an errant email to be forgotten nor will it lose a blog post. The only area were this delay is severely problematic is in Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP), in these situations network load does have an effect but its discussion exceeds the point this post has to make.
The delay network load produces is not as problematic as the United States Senate believes it may be, and that it definitely does not have the authority to control information flow on a national scale.
The series of tubes analogy is great if you want to consider the internet on an international scale, but that is not really what net neutrality is about. Net Neutrality, to the extent covered in this post, only concerns the United States of America. So why does the series of tubes analogy even apply if we do not control the whole network? The application lies in the fact that even if we do not control the entire internet, there is still the one part of it that matters, what people have come to term the last mile.
The progress & freedom foundation published a great paper on this topic. The concision of this paper is that even though one corporation cannot regulate or maintain the network consumers should be allowed to specialize their connections to suit their needs. Their support for this argument was that people only use certain services like VOIP exclusively, cutting down their bandwidth usage in other areas of network usage.
The problem with this idea is that people can just use many services at once, downloading movies talking to people on VOIP even online video games. All of these have one common property: they use the same data network. Some would argue that VOIP is different from a file transfer but when you really get down to the hardware level, it is all just bits and bytes. The specialization that would improve the internet would create a system where users are required to pay more for what comes out to be a service that would not have really cost the company more to provide. The average consumer is most likely already familiar with this kind of a billing system.
Anyone who text messages others is participating in such a system, according to Crunch Gear on a basic texting plan a consumer will end up paying around $1,310.72 comparing this to even the most basic of data plans shows how much of a rip off consumers are receiving because of data specialization.
People who text message are not the only ones who are getting bad run through with distribution companies. Comcast has recently started imposing a hard limit upon customers' bandwidth usage. at first glance this seems like a good and pro-consumer idea on Comcast's part, we have to look further into situation to realize why it is bad. The limit Comcast has chosen is 250 Gigabytes, a fairly large amount of data. The reason they chose this number they say is that only 1 percent of their subscribers use over this much data a month.
The reason hard barriers on how much data a internet subscriber are a bad idea is very simple: times change. In 1995 when computer hard drives were rarely, greater than five Gigabytes in size customers would not have cared if they could download only a specific amount of data like 250 Gigabytes. Now only thirteen years later, you can buy a hard drive that stores 1.5 Terabytes for less than half the cost of that five-gig drive would have cost. markets have also changed, instead of a majority of internet users connecting with dial up, we now use broadband or cable that can transfer at potentially thousands of times more data.
There are many actions customers need to take to prevent the ultimate freedom the internet provides from being destroyed. An easy way is to post messages on forums and other blogging networks about this message. You can also call your state senator or representative and tell them that you support network neutrality. Join in with other supporters to spread the message through rallies and other public meetings. Anyone can spread the message with the help of websites such as savetheinternet.com/. If you would like to find more information on net neutrality, these websites can be strongly recommend for you to visit and participate in the following websites:
http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/internet/26816res20060925.html
Unfortunatly...
Network neutrality is a more important issue than it is being given credit for. Unfortunatly it is not being discussed because of big issues like the economy. Even worse, both oponnents seem to want to kill network neutrality. This is almost funny since John McCain is so open about his complete lack of technological understanding. On the other hand, Biden seems to want to ruin computers forever. He wants to make encryption illegal. This probably even includes ssl, since illegal file sharer's usually use it, but how will your ebay transactions be secured without ssl?
More on the topic of your essay, while you took an interesting stance to explain it to those without technical knowledge, I think you may have lost sight of some of the issues. For example, you didn't even mention file sharing, it's tendency to be illegal, and it's extremely large bandwidth usage. I'm not sure that VOIP was ever mentioned so far in the debating, but it is a very good example of something that almost couldn't be illegal, but could still might be unfairly punished. Unfortunately many experts are forecasting that the internet will begin to slow down due to the rise of watching HD Videos, which I might add can be legal. All the major networks are now hosting their TV shows online, for free, and sometimes in HD.
The mention of being charged specifically for kinds of usage is a good thing to bring up. This reminds me a lot of the phone companies, at least in the way they bill. The internet is not like phones though. The phone company does not delay your call based on the how probable it is that you will talk for a long time, or that your call might be unimportant.
After giving an analogy some thought, I have concluded that the best analogy is not that the internet is like a series of tubes. Instead I believe the internet is like a venue for performance. The venue's cost changes based on the seating capacity and location of the performance area. They do not, and are not allowed to change the cost based on the topic or kind of performance you give. More relevent to the issue, they do pentalize you if fill up more than 10% of the seats. You pay a flat rate for the quality, even if nobody shows up. If you choose to do something illegal, that isn't protected by free speech, you do face legal consequences and possibly an immediate termination of your performance.
What I was saying in the analogy, but in terms of Network Neutrality: You may express yourself however you want on the internet. You can never exceed the bandwidth you are allotted, but will pay the same if you use it all or none of it. If you do something illegal, like stealing, you are responsibile, not the ISP.
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