Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality

Imagine, if you will, that the Internet delivered content like television: a very small amount of tightly regulated content is available, and if you want to see different content, you have to pay more. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s not too far-fetched.

Net neutrality is the concept that nobody should have an advantage over how their content is delivered. If one company has the same capacity for outgoing bandwidth as another, a customer should not be able to notice any difference when accessing either site. This principle is being threatened by proposed new FCC rules (the FCC is the US government agency in charge of network regulation). Under the new rules, ISPs would be allowed to offer a premium rate to companies to give their content priority. Ever experienced lag in your online game because your roommate wanted to download the latest episode of Game of Thrones on Netflix? Under the new rules, it would be possible for your content to simply not arrive until someone with the same ISP next door finished downloading their show.

For now, that’s not the case, and these rules only apply to US-based ISPs. But from here, it’s only a few steps away from the internet-becomes-television situation. If ISPs can make money from companies willing to pay for faster access, there’s no incentive to even serve small, independent websites that don’t pay them. Take a look at your browser’s history. How many of your most recently visited sites either don’t or haven’t always had the capacity to pay for faster access? My history has things like Facebook, Google, and YouTube – sites which wouldn’t be able to exist had these rules existed since the beginning of the Internet. Major Canadian ISPs like Bell and Rogers are well-known for not caring much about customers if it means they can make an extra dollar, and if these rules come to fruition, you can bet they’ll be pressuring the government to let them do what their southern counterparts will be doing.

There is hope for an open Internet. In 2012, the controversial anti-net neutrality SOPA and PIPA bills were quietly withdrawn among vast public outcry. In Canada, public advocacy group OpenMedia led a campaign to stop telecom companies charging per byte for home Internet use. The group continues to react against Canadian threats to net neutrality and privacy, fighting against the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Internet censorship efforts, helping to defeat Canadian ‘online spying’ bill C-30, amongst other campaigns. To find out more about protecting the Internet, visit openmedia.ca.