Net Neutrality & Your Vote

Tomorrow is November 4th. Many have voted early, and more have not yet voted. This post goes out to the undecided voters out there (although, I have no idea how you are still undecided), as well as the open-minded decided ones. This is the most important issue for me in the upcoming election, and the candidates have very different perspectives on it.

First, let’s all agree how vital the internet is to modern culture. I don’t think I’m too far out on a limb when I say that the internet is one of the, if not the, most important technological and social development, ever. It is our printing press, if you will. Untold depths of information and cultural expression exist within the four corners of your browser window, and all you need is access. For $10 per month paid to a local internet service provider (“ISP”), anyone in the world can take free courses online from MIT. And what did we do before the catharsis of spewing our personalities to the world on myspace? Turn-by-turn directions?! Such content! Even more than all that, the internet is single-handedly defining an entire global generation, and its affects on the world have been and will hopefully continue to be as innumerable and limitless as the net itself.

Net neutrality. In my experience, very few people actually know what it is, and fewer truly get how profoundly important it is. Perhaps the best way to explain it is by explaining what it isn’t. Right now, with net neutrality, Time Warner/AT&T/etc. charge different prices based on speed (i.e.: $10/mo. for dial-up, $60/mo. for high-speed). Without net neutrality, Time Warner/AT&T/etc. will be able to additionally charge different prices based on content.

Right now, the government regulates ISPs such that they cannot do this sort of thing – their services must remain content-neutral (thus “net neutrality”). Abolishing this regulation would allow the free market to take over, and ISPs could immediately being charging for whatever they are able, including the content itself. This is one area of my life I do not trust to the market, just because of the potential consequences, pictured below.

This is how the web could look if ISPs begin allotting service by content.

In my opinion, something like this could actually move cultural and technological advancement backwards. This system will destroy the limitlessness of the internet by handing over content to private companies, giving them the power to mete that content to end-users according to who can pay for it. Will a poor student in Arizona be able to take those free MIT courses online? Maybe, if he can afford the internet package that allows access to the site.

At the core of the internet – the thing that makes it so revolutionary – is the at-my-fingertip accessibility of unfathomable amounts of content. We already have accessibility issues (generally, you still need to pay someone for access and find a computer), which people are working hard to overcome with projects like city-wide wifi and the One Laptop Per Child initiative. Do we really need content issues as well?

I would advise anyone voting tomorrow to research where the candidates stand on this important issue, and consider it in deciding where to place your vote.

More about the wonderful image above at boingboing.

(It’s by echobucket of the somethingawful forums.)

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/22/how-a-nonneutral-isp.html

A much more fleshed-out version by one of my favorite speakers, Lawrence Lessig.

(Heads up: it’s very pro-Obama.)

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/08/me_on_mccain_on_technology.html