The Net Neutrality rules that govern the internet in the United States is about to change unless the public support demands it stay. Net Neutrality ensures internet providers cannot play favorites with different websites. It restricts the ISPs from controlling content and speed of content.
HULU and Netflix will get the same download speeds at your house with Net Neutrality. Without Net Neutralit,y, an ISP, provider like your cable company, can decide to give you HULU at their regular speed and slow down Netflix where it is unwatchable. They might do this because they feel Netflix takes too much of their bandwidth or because HULU is willing to pay the provider extra money to ensure they keep their speeds up.
Companies like Comcast and Time Warner have already done this in the past. They extorted money from Netflix after slowing down their service to a crawl. Netflix paid up the on the shakedown because they had no choice but pay or lose a ton of business.
Geeky KOOL is a website that relies on the people coming to read our articles and watch the videos. If our site is slowed down because we cannot afford to pay like bigger websites, then Geeky KOOL will die a “slow” death. Just like a small local store would die if the big box stores could pay to stop traffic from flowing to the smaller stores. If you notice, Geeky KOOL has a pop up today sharing this information.
I have friends and family that don’t support Net Neutrality. They believe the internet doesn’t need to be regulated. I would completely agree if there was competition in internet providers. But most people don’t have any competition for it. Most areas have a monopoly on their internet provider so they don’t have a choice. I am a free market person but this isn’t free market without Net Neutrality.
ISP are designed to provide bandwidth and speed for use. They shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers on what websites we can go to and support. Net Neutrality ensures this.
Below are a couple of videos that discuss where we are now and where we have been. They talk about why Net Neutrality is important.
If you would like to support Net Neutrality, you can sign the petition at Battle For The Net or Change.Org. You can call or tweet your Representatives and Senators. Don’t forget to use the hashtag #NetNeutrality. You can find the twitter handles for your Representatives on this Google Doc.
Stay Geeky My Friends!