Net Neutrality

What is "net neutrality"? What does the FCC and Comcast have to do with it? Take a side and defend your position. Make is interesting for me.

Net neutrality is basically about freedom to use the internet for whatever you want without limitations. Currently there are no laws to enforce this freedom and there are lobbyists on both sides trying to either get it into law or keep it out.

It breaks down like this... Some ISPs may in the future decide that it is in their financial interest to direct traffic to a search engine or other site with whom they have partnered with. They could do this by blocking your access to the other search engines.

Also they could use this to offer tiered service. For example, if you are a web designer and upload a lot of info via FTP or a gamer who likes to play online games the ISP could limit your services if you don't pay more. They could say to the web designer that they have to pay for a more expensive business account or the online gamer to pay for faster access to their games.

The FCC is the regulatory agency that currently doesn't have adequate regulations to allow for net neutrality. Comcast was found to be blocking or delaying BitTorrent uploads on their network. Comcast was penalized for doing so but never had to admit that it did anything wrong. Within a year the FCC ruled that Comcast broke the law by limiting access to bandwidth.

I believe that net neutrality is important but I do not think that we have to go around making laws in favor of it. Congress placing laws against net netrality can just make it harder to change later if those laws are abused. It seems like the FCC did address the problem with Comcast in the end.

Another reason I disagree with making laws is because it goes against the basic idea of capitalization. If a company decides to limit service or offer a tiered system they will most likely fail because everyone will go to a different provider. It is their risk to institute a such a system. If the public decides to go for it, it will be societies fault for not boycotting it. According to Wikipedia, Time Warner Cable "introduced their intention to move to a 'consumption based billing' plan." Basically they where going to charge people more for higher usage. When the put their plan into action the public got pretty angry and they had to abandon their efforts. Regulations can be made as serious abuses are committed but there is no need to overreact.