Net Neutrality
When hearing about net neutrality, you think to yourself what is it, and how does it effect my online business. Net Neutrality is companies want to be able to throttle how much data their users are using and charge them elevated prices for their usage. One asks, why haven’t they been able to do this before. In this article we will discover how it effects every day Americans, growing online businesses and who will benefit.
The Basics
So there are 10 major internet companies in the USA:
| Company | Subscriptions | Services |
|---|---|---|
| Windstream | 1,017,400[26] | DSL access at speeds from 3 to 12 Mbit/s. Also offers fiber, Metro Ethernet & T1 speeds, up to 1 Gbit/s.[40] |
| Verizon | 6,978,000[26] | DSL access at speeds of 0.5 to 15 Mbit/s, and fiber access (FiOS) at speeds of 50 to 1 Gbit/s.[31][32] |
| Mediacom | 1,194,000[26] | Cable Internet access at speeds from 60 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s. [39] |
| Frontier | 4,000,000[26] | DSL access at speeds from 6 to 12 Mbit/s.[37] Fiber access with speeds up to 10 Gbit/s.[38] |
| Cox | 4,860,000[26] | Cable Internet access at speeds of 5 to 300 Mbit/s. Also offers fiber access at speeds of 1 Gbit/s.[35] |
| Comcast | 25,519,000[26] | Cable Internet access at speeds up to 250 Mbit/s.[27] But may maxed out with its maximum plan (Gigabit Pro 2GB, speeds at 2 Gbit/s).[28] |
| Charter | 23,603,000[26] | Cable Internet access at speeds up to 100 Mbit/s.[29] |
| CenturyLink | 5,767,000[26] | DSL access at speeds up to 40 Mbit/s.[33] Fiber access available at up to 1 Gbit/s[34] |
| AT&T | 15,715,000[26] | DSL access at speeds up to 18 Mbit/s, and FTTN VDSL2 access (AT&T Internet) at speeds up to 100 Mbit/s. Fiber access available at up to 1 Gbit/s[30] |
| Altice USA | 4,020,900[26] | Cable Internet access at speeds up to 101 Mbit/s.[36] |
These companies want to be able to throttle people’s access to the internet and would potentially, though probably wouldn’t happen like this, restrict access to certain websites.
So What are the objections?
So while you would think they would be legally able to check how much data you are using, it is a breach of privacy, they would be able to see what websites you are visiting, how much data you are using, and most of all CENSOR what you see. So the objection is they would be more involved in knowing what you are doing on the internet and thus restrict people’s freedom of being able to go to certain sites or to browse freely.
As a Web Developer
As a web developer I feel that this would hurt me as they would be able to limit the amount of traffic I receive on my web server or even decide they want to block my website from being accessed. I would also have the option to pay them to advertise my site to people, having them redirect traffic to my site. It really commercializes and restricts people’s ability to access the internet, as it would allow them to throttle people’s internet access without any question to privacy.
Hopefully the people in the government will say that this is a step in the wrong direction, putting too much power in the internet service providers hands and limiting people’s ability to access the internet and it’s contents.