The Pros And Cons Of Network Neutrality

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The ongoing debate over the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and network neutrality as seen on major news articles and media outlets more often than not tend to put the subject in a one-sided manner for mostly political reasons. The fact that this topic has been receiving so much political heat lately lye strictly around the government intervention on the issue. When looking at the topic, the main concerns seem prevalent in everybody’s mind. What are the encompassing societal repercussions that will happen, or has happened? What are the economical pushbacks that this has caused? How do companies feel about all these mix ups and changes? How will the network neutrality debate affect the end user? These are the questions everyone is trying …show more content…

Within the recent years leading up to this debate, the internet overall has been frequently expanding, causing a magnitude of consistently new applications and growth accompanying these technological advancements. Whether it be media platforms, commerce, travel, communications or developments to make subjects like these faster and easier to understand, the network neutrality principle has come into play alongside progressions such as these. With the control internet service providers (ISP) already have, and the free rein the average internet users all want to have, the FCC has voted to approve and implement net neutrality regulations. Overall, the big picture of Network neutrality comes down to employing a well-established “common carrier” set of regulations to the internet in order to preserve its “freedom and openness”. (“What Is Net Neutrality?” 2017, December). What this means is that the regulations prohibit the owner of a network, which can be accessed by everyone, from any segregation against content delivery. This discrimination could include halting, slowing, or even manipulating data. This would be an extreme case of abuse on part of internet service providers, yet not entirely unpractical as this kind of behavior has occurred before. For example, we saw this happen in 2012 when AT&T completely disabled Apples video chat application FaceTime from being run on its mobile network unless users decided to pay extra for a select data plan. (Sankin, A. 2017, December 14) This is not the only example that violates and exposes what network neutrality principles set out to prevent. We see cases similar to this one quite rarely, yet it still an issue of major