Persuasive Essay On Net Neutrality

990 Words4 Pages

We think we have a democracy in the United States of America, the freedom of the people choosing how things are run. However, lately the people’s voices aren’t being heard. In fact, a policy was just put in place that 83% of Americans opposed, seems like the vast majority to me! Of course, I’m talking about Net Neutrality, which was just repealed despite the wishes of, let me say that again 83% of Americans, the obvious vast majority. But what is Net Neutrality anyways? Well, according to Dictionary.com in 2003, Net Neutrality is “the concept that broadband Internet service providers should provide nondiscriminatory access to Internet content, platforms, etc., and should not manipulate the transfer of data regardless of its source or destination.” …show more content…

And, from February 26th, 2015 onward, we have adopted the practices of Net Neutrality, which makes is so that ISPs cannot treat any website differently because of, for example, the content on that website or how much that website pays. But without Net Neutrality, ISPs basically control the internet. They are able to “throttle” or slow down certain websites for whatever reason they see fit, they can charge you different amounts of money to be able to see certain websites. For example, if you’ve ever looked at your parents cable bill/how they buy cable, if you have it, then you will notice that certain channels come in packages, the local channels like Fox 4 News being in the lowest package, and the more popular ones, such as cartoon network, HBO, and others costing more money in “bundles.” Well, according to the NY Times on Dec. 14, 2017 “Many consumer advocates have argued that if the rules get scrapped, broadband providers will begin selling the internet in bundles, not unlike how cable television is sold today,” for example, say you want access to stuff like Instagram and Twitter, those might be sold under a social media package, meanwhile you have to pay extra for a video watching package to get YouTube and Netflix. ISPs could do even …show more content…

According to USA Today on Dec. 20, 2017, “That’s when an internet provider such as Verizon or Comcast decides to charge services like YouTube or Amazon for faster access to users. Firms that decline to pay up could wind up in bumper-to-bumper slow lanes.” For example, say there are three companies, a large corporation, a local business, and a small family startup. The large corporation is able to give the ISP a lot of money, so the ISP makes sure their website loads up nice and fast. The local business is able to give the ISP a little bit of money, so their website can load, but not as fast as the corporation’s website can. Finally, the small family startup is barely able to pay the ISP anything, therefore their website takes a full 1-2 minutes to load. Can you see why that would be a problem? Small businesses, which a lot of the time now might only be on the internet now, would have to pay to even be able to load their websites. Which could cause them to never be seen, and therefore not be able to