Net Neutrality

SAVE THE INTERNET

The Internet has always been a way of communication that is absolutely democrat. The information hosted in a server, when requested, would be sent through wires to the clients who requested it. It's like connecting two people. One has some information, and the other one is asking for that information. In all this the wire only transports the information. The wire is neutral because it delivers all the information with the same speed and the same priority. That is the democratic way the Internet is as we know it today and it's called "Network Neutrality".

But there is another truth that might change all this. It is fact that all the information that comes through wires into our houses passes first through a gateway, owned by the Internet Service Provider (ISP). That means the gateway has complete control over the information traffic that passes through it. That's why police and FBI cooperate with ISPs (like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and so on) in order to track down cyber-criminals and so on. All information on the Internet passes through these gateways.

But what happens if one day a filter is applied to the traffic passing through a gateway? Let's say that all information from or to a country is blocked. Or the information from and to a company (for example MySpace.com/ Google.com/ Yahoo.com/ NewYorkTimes.com) is blocked. Or maybe only the information about democratic (or republican) senators. Or all the video-kind information.

The ISP might require you to pay more to be able to see videos on the Internet. Might ask MySpace.com or NewYorkTimes.com to pay a fee if they want to be reachable to the ISP subscribers. The democrat senators might just be censored because of their political affiliation.

Some filters might be set to just slow down the traffic from and to a location so that for example ISP can require a tax to those companies who wants send and receive information in the express lane, while the others have to stay in the slow lane.

It is so that one of the most democratic creations of men can be bounded. Net Neutrality can be violated by ISPs if Internet freedom and neutrality is not guaranteed by law. The world wide democracy that Internet represents can be changed into a tyranny by ISPs who only care about profits.

This topic already matters to me because I believe that democracy exist when to people are able to communicate together without external interference; when somebody interferes in that conversation, it's called dictatorship.