Net Neutrality means that every person on the planet has equal access to every website and that every person on the planet has equal access (and affordability) to create a website. Yes, it takes money to run a website, but the affordability should not be determined based on who you are but based on, well, how much you can afford. Barack Obama assured that this would remain the case passed a law saying that the Internet is a utility, similar to electricity, water, etc. This means that we need it. As he said, “the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life.” Basically, We, the People, are screwed if we don’t have it, and They, the Corporations will have priority access to the whole Internet via what’s called a “fast lane.” Just so you know, that lane won’t actually be faster than it is now. Service provider will just slow down certain websites, virtually all of them, unless you pay to speed it up. It’s like having to pay for HBO except now the only websites you won’t be paying for are the really big ones that already have millions of views and so can afford the service provider’s fee. Everyone else who wants to create a website will be screwed because the barriers to entry will be gigantic.
The Internet was created several decades ago and became a part of our lives around 1995 with America Online. Remember that CD’s that came in the mail, specifying an exact amount of hours you could use the Internet? Remember using up all those hours so quickly because you were so excited to have the Internet even if it was just an online encyclopedia? Now imagine that’s taken away from you and you need a 300-pound volume of textbooks on two bookshelves, each book for one letter of the alphabet. Now imagine YouTube goes away. Imagine you couldn’t access Amazon.
Okay, stop hyperventilating. You won’t lose YouTube or Amazon, and they’ll continue to be free and running at the same speed they do now. However, Etsy and other up-and-coming e-commerce sites might require payment or suffer slower speeds until they can afford to pay for the fastlane. That’s really scary. That means these businesses could fail. In fact, web-based entrepreneurship, which is basically all entrepreneurship, could fail. In fact, it probably will fail if FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai gets his way.
In fact, it probably will fail if FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai gets his way. Think about blog sites like Medium, which wasn’t so big until a few years ago. Would the creators have gone through with it? Would we have that site? What about the people who created MapMyRun, essentially a site to create maps of where you jog everyday and then communicate with other runners online and compare their routes with yours and see whose fastest on the same routes? That’s not a for-profit site. Eventually, however, it made money through advertising. Eventually, UnderArmour bought it for a lot of money. That’s entrepreneurship, and that’s what we’d lose if we lose Net Neutrality.
Much like those late-night infomercials, though: THAT’S NOT ALL! BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
Not only does this affect the economy, primarily the small businesses that Republicans say they love, but it affects foreign policy, education, diplomacy, and democracy itself.
Foreign Policy
Since the attack in Manchester, UK Prime Minister Theresa May stated that the internet should be censored somewhat in order to prevent fora for extremists to collaborate, plan, and even purchase materials to commit acts. The first step in any battle is to cut the enemy’s lines of communication. I got that. But by doing so, you’re irreparably harming all other law-abiding citizens. By not shutting down individual websites based on activity but censoring whole swaths of the Internet itself, you’re doing the same thing that Trump’s travel ban sought to do. You’re punishing everyone for the wrongdoings of the few. Now, May’s comments were quickly muted by her opponents so that’s good. However, over here in the U.S., the national security argument is still alive. There are arguments about ransomware and other acts otherwise labeled cyberterror.
While I agree that there are major issues with online communication between people who wish to do harm, I believe that any cyberdefense team dedicated to their work will find a way that doesn’t harm citizens. That said, there’s a far greater reality that is beyond the scope of this article that I believe is the center of most of the attacks committed against us, which is that the actions of terrorists, such as these online acts, are intended to entangle everyday citizens such that there is no way to harm the terrorists without harming the citizens. If you’re familiar with my other writings, you know that this process of engagement and containment, which I summarize as one thing called entanglement, is the operative goal of terror organizations as well as governments of whole countries like Iran, North Korea, China, and others. It’s very possible that, via cyber attacks, these groups and governments have found a way to harm us without firing a single bullet. However, it remains to be seen, and would be highly classified enough to remain unseen, whether this threat is, in fact, existential in nature. The much more likely scenario is that the national security argument is a total lie motivated by billions of potential profits. To think otherwise would be to think that corporations and the military are somehow aligned in their goals and are also able to work together, which is an asinine thought.
Education
Before I became a writer, I worked in business. Miserable. I won’t go into detail–I don’t want to–but I did graduate with an MBA last year from one of the top MBA programs in the United States. Just prior to matriculating, they had what they called the MBA Institute. Pearson Education came on campus and judged our performance in a 48-hour case competition in which we had to take their education materials and put them online in the best way possible.
Our team did not make it to the final round. However, during the Q&A just prior to that, one of the judges pointed out to me that, if we do make it to the final round, that I should remember my answer and expand greatly upon it because it was outstanding. All I said was that, with just an ethernet cord, Pearson Education could be the first to enter markets in rural areas in Africa, not to mention many places in Asia, including burgeoning Myanmar, where most of the West hasn’t really gone yet. I bolstered this by saying there are many public-private partnerships with for example Coca-Cola that train locals in impoverished countries and then employ them at such companies as Coca-Cola and others. It’s the rawest form of an innovation system in which the companies and the people and the education system work together to give people skills that they need to get jobs at companies created to provide what the people want.
Apparently, they liked the idea that you didn’t need to do anything except ensure that schools have a steady internet connection. All that’s necessary to educate people around the world and, if you’re interested in making money, to profit from such education services, is to have a steady internet connection. However, you can’t drop a server in the middle of a small town in Africa or Southeast Asia. Therefore, if there’s a non-profit serving these countries, suddenly, to provide services, their costs are going to spike and they’ll be unable to afford it. So, what’s going to happen? China will educate them. Sound good, Mr. Pai? How about you, Trump? With the Internet, everybody wins in every way, and you want to take that away? Idiot.
Now, let’s focus on what’s even easier to understand: kids learn in different ways. There have been so many innovations in education in the past 10 years. Yes, for-profit online colleges are a joke, but even top-tier colleges are now offering the same education in an online setting. Some have even been proven by employers, students, and education scholars to be just as good as education in the classroom. More importantly, young kids benefit from online education. Some schools give iPads to even kindergarten students to use in the classroom. They’re more engaged, these multiple forms of teaching reach more students, they learn more quickly and retain more, and they’re happier. Even greater, kids with disabilities are also learning. There’s so much that the Internet can do for kids’ education, and I guarantee Ajit Pai and Betsy DeVos want to ensure that only private schools can afford fastlane access to innovative pedagogy that helps everyone instead of just the typical student. If you do that, you’re hurting kids, making them less competitive worldwide, and you’re hurting the economy because, surprise surprise, you can’t do very well at your job if you don’t have the skills to do it.
Diplomacy
With the Internet, every single person in every single country is a diplomat. People often say, when you visit another country, you represent your own country. When I visited Europe on the People-to-People Ambassador program in 1999, a program created by President Eisenhower to bring Western European citizens and American citizens closer together, our chaperones often said: “Remember, you’re representing your whole country. So BEHAVE!” A threat, yes, but also a very true statement and the embodiment of the program. With the Internet, we don’t have to get on a plane to communicate with someone in another country. It’s immeasurable how much we’ll lose in influencing other countries to adopt our way of life or to even have a democratic system rather than dictatorship, especially in the wake of China’s push to win them over with money. We try to win them over with aid and with convincing speeches about how everyone in their country deserves a shot, but if we’re not giving them enough money AND Ajit Pai takes away our ability to speak to them, then this country might as well not even exist anymore because we’ll have no way to interact with other countries unless we blindly get on a plane and go there. There’s literally NO CHANCE of convincing anyone that we’re good people that way.
Democracy
At its core, I’ll describe democracy as our ability to run our own country via informed decisions about whom to elect to represent us. In other words, we can’t all run the country at once so we need others to do it for us, but we get to choose them ourselves. Without the ability to make an informed decision, it’ll be hard to elect the right people. This country has been around for more than 200 years, and we did well electing people before the Internet. HOWEVER, the information that we’ve gained via the Internet comes from our interactions with each other. The Internet is basically one big manifestation of the First Amendment’s clause that enumerates “the right of the people peacefully to assemble.” Instead of going to door to door to tell people to show up in the town square, we can create websites at will, without a fee, and we can link those sites to Facebook and elsewhere or just pass the web address via e-mail, without fear that recipients won’t be able to access the site. Therefore, we’re able to assemble and create much larger movements that get the attention of people that are supposed to represent us.Our representatives, too, need to know what we want. If a constituency changes its mind or has more information to share, our representatives won’t know that until they go to a townhall and EVERYONE shows up.
Our representatives, too, need to know what we want. If a constituency changes its mind or has more information to share, our representatives won’t know that until they go to a townhall and EVERYONE shows up. But now we’re always at the townhall, always talking, always sharing ideas, and always telling our representatives what we’ve come up with and what we’d like them to do. Movements like https://grabyourwallet.org/ and others that are basically just simple websites where, in that case, you can learn which companies are doing wrong by us, aren’t profit-generating and aren’t interested in commerce. They just want to get the word out, and these are the websites that will be slowed down. Instead of 5 bars, you’ll get 3 unless you pay. In other words, any website you don’t already know you like, you won’t pay for it, which means you won’t find out about so many companies that are abusing their customers, their employees, the general public, and even our representatives via tantalizing agreements that fund their reelection campaigns.
In short, certain things are getting worse in this country but the Internet told us about it, and those who are treating us horribly want to prevent us from knowing about it, sharing it with others, and assembling to fight against it, and that is a degradation of our democracy.
So what can we do about it?
Well, you could call Congress, and you could also protest the end of net neutrality. You should emphasize that the FCC cannot, because of what Obama ensured in making it a utility, erase net neutrality unless, according to the law, they find that net neutrality is illegal. It cannot be overturned unless it is determined to be unconstitutional. Therefore, we need to remind our government of that.
Also, in order to ensure that your own content is not slowed down, you should immediate append your website with an e-commerce component. That could be as simple as including a link to a place where you sell a product. You could also enable advertising if you have enough viewers, and if not, create your own advertisements, but you’ll have to make sure they link to an e-commerce site like Amazon, Etsy, or others, in order to tell the government that they could earn sales tax as long as they don’t slow down your site. The ISPs won’t be able to slow you down if the government says you can’t slow down revenue-generating sites. Any roll back of any regulation, just like everything else, will be nuanced and have many exceptions, and I think this will be one of them. Many blog platforms have a commerce functionality now. Just open the help window and chat with the helpdesk if you’re having trouble setting it up.
Finally, tell your Congressman all the ways you use the Internet, how many times you used it to look up facts for a job interview or a project at school, how you paid for things you couldn’t find at the store, how you learned crucial information before traveling to a country with a shaky tourism record, and how you stayed informed about what’s going on in your town, in D.C., and around the world because you had unfiltered, equal access to information.
Tell them specific information, with references to specific non-revenue-generating web addresses, that led to your decision to elect them. Make sure they know they were elected based on information on these sites.
We have the power to do this. We can make sure the Internet is still a reality for all Americans and all people around the world who want to access websites run here. There are issues regarding international regulations and who should have control over the Internet, and we can make sure our voices are heard there, too, but we need to make sure we don’t censor our own Internet if we’re going to tell the world they shouldn’t censor theirs.