Monday, January 10, 2011

Net Neutrality

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/net-neutrality-fight-gop-wields-garlic-against-fcc-vampires.ars

So I was reading this article and it seems the majority of people are confused about what Net Neutrality actually means. The term Net Neutrality seems to have become a slogan for politicians to confuse the hell out of the average person to the point of just not caring. Even the writer of this article seems to be confused at whether he should hate Marsha Blackburn or not. At one point he states that her legislation is "anti-net neutrality" when it is clearly pro net neutrality.

Here is the definition I snipped from Berkeley's website:

Simply put, net neutrality is a network design paradigm that argues for broadband network providers to be completely detached from what information is sent over their networks.  In essence, it argues that no bit of information should be prioritized over another.  This principle implies that an information network such as the internet is most efficient and useful to the public when it is less focused on a particular audience and instead attentive to multiple users. 

Based on that definition, every single American that enjoys anything that the internet has to offer should rally behind  Marsha Blackburn for defending our right to enjoy a free and relatively unregulated internet. We don't need to fragment the service into separate payment tiers based on usage. We also don't need the government to take it over either or it will just end up like every other government-run system, that would only end in tears.