Read on Twitter
Over breakfast with my husband this morning the topic turned to #NetNeutrality . IKR but bear with me.
I’ll start by saying Net Neutrality was a good idea that was subjugated by nefarious players.
Today’s version isn’t about an open fair internet. It is about control.
I’ll start by saying Net Neutrality was a good idea that was subjugated by nefarious players.
Today’s version isn’t about an open fair internet. It is about control.
Imagine you commute between two cities and grow tired of the long drive so you save up your money and build a shorter road. In order to offset your cost, you decide to charge other people a small sum ($1) for access to your short-cut.
Shortly, your road is overwhelmed with large trucks that want to deliver their goods and products faster.
These big trucks soon clog up your road, and cause more wear and tear than a standard automobile. The nominal rate you charge is no longer enough to maintain your road.
As the road owner/operator, you have a choice to make: you can choose to charge the trucks more ($2), or increase the cost equally across all vehicles ($1.25) and ask the little vehicles to help subsidize the trucks.
You decide to charge the big trucks more ($2) and use the additional revenue to upgrade, repair, and widen the road to relieve the congestion.
This is good because it's fair to the little guys, and places a proportional share of the maintenance and expansion burden on the big guys, without overly burdening the little guys, right?
Now you build a carpool/fast lane, and charge a little more (+$0.50) for access during hours of peak congestion. Maybe you add a bicycle lane and a sidewalk, and charge a smaller fee ($0.25) for these users. Commuters praise your innovation, right?
Now, replace roads with networks, and vehicles with content and you can understand why certain video streaming companies and other content providers (the big trucks) believe they should pay the same as the little guys.
The argument is that everyone should have to pay the same for "access," and the burden for use and maintenance should be "neutral" and shared across all consumers.
After all, it's not like the big guys are arbitrarily using the road; the little guys requested their goods and services, so the little guys should have to pay!
Because the big guys don't want to have to pay for "fast lane access," they use fear mongering to scare the consumers; "we'll have to raise the price of our products," they exclaim, or, "your ISP will block our content if you don't give us our neutrality!"
It gets even worse... back to our analogy: Road-neutrality would demand that the big guys be allowed to connect to the on-ramps into your road, not be charged for connecting, and you have to build and maintain the connection point!
They claim this "settlement-free exchange" should be free because it goes both ways, but in reality the upgraded/new interchange only serves the big guy's traffic. Now you will need to raise the cost to all of the little guys to pay for this on-ramp.
Even if the little guy isn't a consumer of the big guys products and services, they still have to share the burden, because neutrality says we have to treat everyone equitably, and equally.
Even if they aren't equal users of the system. All you want to do is charge the users proportionally to the strain they are putting on your system.
As stated, neutrality forces you to make everyone share in the cost equally, and treat all traffic the same (yes, even if it's only a bicycle, or a pedestrian.) You know not all traffic is the same and not all consumers consume the internet in the same way!
The good idea behind Net Neutrality, before it was subverted by politicians and greedy corporate fear-mongers, was the idea of anti-censorship and anti-monopolistic behavior.
ISPs should not be allowed to decide what content you look at. ISPs should not be able to throttle one content provider over another.
But... if a content provider wants to pay extra to use the fast lane, and as long as the prioritization doesn't impair a competitor's ability to service its customers, that's free commerce.
As usual, certain political lap-dogs obeyed their greedy lobbyist masters and turned something that could have been a consumer boon into a corporate boondoggle.
Anyways, that’s our attempt to explain it. Not sure the #Hollywood types will ever comprehend. No pictures. 🤔 #NetNeutrality
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
