I like to think of myself as a somewhat semi-informed person, but apparently I’ve been in the dark about the issue of net neutrality and how Big Business is threatening the way we use and navigate the internet.
I learned that the United States has fallen behind in internet speed–we’re worse than 10th place when it comes to delivering content. All the marvels and miracles of the internet, such as conferencing with medical specialists and virtual classrooms, require fiber-optic internet connections, which phone companies promised to build in the 1990s and never did.
Now these very same phone companies want to charge internet sites a fee that determines how quickly their pages load. This means that if your blogging site can’t afford the fee, your site may never load. In the same way that the channels on TV and radio and cable are owned by a handful of corporations, so too might the internet be owned by a few corporations, thus censoring free speech and commerce.
The work that we do as educators is already so pushed into the margins of commercial America. How much more invisible will a non-neutral net cause us to be? I can see helpful sites, such as the OWL at Purdue, the Dante Project, or our very own cac.ophony getting pushed into the “slow lane” of a non-neutral internet. These phone companies are, I kid you not, trying to convince us that the internet has “lanes of traffic.”
For more information on net neutrality and how it affects us, please go to Save the Internet.com.
This is indeed a really important issue for all of us. Among other things, the likes of Verizon argue that companies like Google get a free ride bcse they take up so much available space in what Sen. Stevens famously called the “system of tubes” that comprise the internet and don’t have to pay extra for all that volume. That said, it’s an interestingly argued debate, a little confusing at times, and harder than one might think to figure out who’s looking out for the regular person. Here’s the link to the senate hearings from last year to watch or read if anyone’s interested.