The Daily Skunk

You may have heard about it before, but I think it is important so I figured I’d write something about it to try to make it easy to understand.

First, check out this comercial on Net Neutrality from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association

Sounds like net neutrality is gonna cost us a lot more money and big business will get more of that deal. surely that is something we can all get behind, net neutrality is bad. Don’t let this happen to us.

Well the fact is that we do have net neutrality right now, but what exactly is Net Neutrality? When you ask your web browser for a website, that request goes thru computers at your ISP, and then on to other computers where the site actually exists. As you are requesting websites, so are millions of other people, at the very same second that you are. With net neutrality (what we have today) those requests have no priority over other requests. The ISP cannot give bandwidth priority to google over The Daily Skunk, or any other website.

Now assume net neutrality is done away with (like several republican representatives would like). Now your ISP has the right to give priority to requests that go to a Yahoo website over requests that go to a Google website. Why would they want to do that? Maybe Yahoo pays them to do it. Or a likely situation is an ISP may decide that they just don’t want to use the bandwidth for users to watch streaming video, so they block or just severly restrict access to YouTube or other video sharing sites. Basically it lets someone else decide what you see and what you don’t see.

Now check out this video that tries to explain Net Neutrality in a simple way for anyone to understand. Notice the difference, one tries to explain it, one tries to confuse and scare you.

And for more information read the Wikipedia article on Net Neutrality if you want, or Google’s net neutrality guide.

You will hear the argument that doing away with net neutraility will save you some money, and that might be true. Without net neutrality ISP’s could charge content providers for priority, which could potentially lead to them passing on savings to us, the consumers. but why would they lower our prices, really? If I wanted to pay less for a filtered, censored internet, I’d move to china.

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