Why Losing Net Neutrality is one step closer to 1984

Oh hi! So you’r ready this page for a couple reasons. 1) You might not buy the “liberal fake news” telling you that the USA, FCC of 2017 in December repealing the “Obama-era” choking and micromanaging of the internet is bad for America as a nation. 2) You simply want to know what all the hub-bub is about. 3) You know the loss of Net Neutrality is bad, but are looking for some concise bullets points to highlight of how this is bad for The United States of America, Capitalism, and Competition.

• ISPs can now charge consumers for access to specific sites/services
• ISPs can now charge businesses for preferential speeds or to not be throttled
• ISPs now favor data packet speed based on where it’s going & what it is. Your internet usage has no privacy. ISPs now track and collect everything you do online and sell that information
• In large swaths of the country ISPs (Comacast/Verizon) have a monopoly and they can take advantage of that.
• Is the speed/access throttling of information a threat to free speech/information?

• ISPs can now charge for access to specific sites/services — While the likelyhood of this happening is to be determined, this is now something that can be done. Also, this has been done before. Do you remember the days where if you had a Verizon phone, you could only use the Verizon map service which you had to pay more money for to be able to use their map service? So here is an idea. If all customers of Verizon were suddenly charged $5/Month to be able to use google maps, people would flee to other providers right? So instead Verizon will charge google money to allow their service to be used on their phones/network. That increased cost may or may not be felt by the customer but it is now felt by Google. But hey, it’s Google right?
• Because ISPs can charge, small businesses can’t compete — A competitor to Amazon/SnapChat/Trivia HQ comes along but they can’t pay to be on the faster lane or get preferential treatment from an ISP so they take 2x–3x as long to load. It’s a researched truth that long load times lead to people abandoning services and not interacting with them. Small business now have another hurdle into competing on the Internet
• ISPs now favor data packet speed based on where it’s going & what it is. ISPs now track and collect everything you do online and sell that information — To able to prioritize data packets an ISPs have to know where packets are going and what is in those packets. While i understand the Ameican eye roll here as the Patriot Act allowed the mass spying upon the entire American people in the defense of “freedom”, by taking away your privacy, we’re now doing this so not only Google, Facebook, Amazon can collect/market/sell/utilize your data, but now your ISP can. You’re ISP sees everything you do online at all times. A analogy I’ve seen is the ISP is not the postal office opening up and looking at every pieces of mail to make decisions of how that mail/data is transferred.
• In large swaths of the country ISPs (Comcast/Verizon) have a monopoly and they can take advantage of that- Let me provide you an example. The only 2 airlines that flew between Pittsburgh & Philadelphia was southwest & us airlines. A roundtrip ticket was ~$160. Southwest pulled their service, leaving US. Airways the only route. A roudtrip ticket is now ~$600, as it can be due to the monopoly on the airline route. As milk is more expensive in parts of the country an internet connection is more expensive in parts of the country. Now if ISPs chop up the internet and charge producers or consumers more for their content they can charge more/less in particular markets. Also what if a websites doesn’t serve the interest of Comcast, they can now just block it.
• Is the speed/access throttling of information a threat to free speech/information? — Well, regardless of what you the reader consider a trusted information source what is ISPs throttled those who couldn’t pay or simply made you choose a news slant. Package A consist of Fox News, The Blaze, Breitbart, Alex Jones while package B consists of Occupy Democrats, the NY Times, PBS, and CBS. What if Comcast just blocks certain news sites? What if they block The Onion, or Snopes? Are you a new web blog or comic that makes fun of comcast/version, they can legally just block your website and not let it be seen by consumers buying frmo them. ISPs can fully control speed on the Internet. They, can control your speech. What if Facebook/Comcast team up to censor the distribution of certain posts, like this one?