Why should there be Internet neutrality?
Recently Verizon and Google issued a joint statement in which they said that Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a premium for quicker Web access. Like most everyone else, my initial reaction was outrage. Everyone should be allowed to get the same access for their service fee. Or should they? ISPs are businesses, so why shouldn’t they maximize their profits? I tried to find an analogy to counter this, but I can’t find any. There is nothing quite like the Internet. The airwaves are licensed to radio and television stations. Book publishers have complete control over what they publish. Can we compare the Web to telephone service or electric service? Should ISPs be turned into semi-public utilities?
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Many people think now could be the golden age as far as the internet is concerned, the
brilliance of the internet is that its content is not policed, and no one body or country has ownership.
Bush also stated a few times that he essentially wanted to find a way of owning the internet;
Its never gonna be a good idea, in fact it would be catastrophic if it were to happen as it would be the first step towards controlling what you view and what you have access to.
However the main point the two companies were talking about is actually the prioritise certain types of data, so P2P on free plans would no doubt be throttled down and prioritised on paid accounts, web surfing would no doubt be a priority service.
Its all to countermeasure against the surge of P2P traffic, and to try and make some money out of the trend to dl more services in bulk.
But yes ultimately this deal only benefits the super giants as they will be able to slow traffic to a rival ISP etc etc…all in all lets hope things stay the way they are for once!
If the ISP’s are paying more money to provide faster speeds, then they have every right to charge more for said speeds (in fact I’m not sure about your ISP, but mine does this now, the 15mbps speed costs more than the 7mbps which is more than 2, etc, etc).
The only thing I would be unhappy with is if they charged you for the amount you downloaded, aka 150gigabytes costs you X dollars, while 10 gigabytes is Y dollars which is much less money. THAT won’t cost them anymore to do.
@tedd interesting you say that because most companies in the UK have moved away from paying by the speed by which you can dl somethinig…
now you tend to find companies operating at the maximum speed on the line for your location and you paying for your bandwidth, I have 60GB a month for a few quid actually its a much better way of doing things, and that’s a fair bit of data!
many advertise as unlimited, but in reality they throttle your line hugely if you go over, at least this way you get the best service possible and enough data for the more than average user.
When the Internet was first established I thought this is great but they are going to find a way to tax this thing. I am just surprised that it hasn’t happened and I think it is too late now.
I already pay a premium to have 7Mbps/768Kbps instead of 1Mbps/384Kbps.
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