Of all the political debates out there, the one that confuses me the most is the notion that some people would be against net neutrality who did not work for ISPs like AT&T and Verizon. There are liberal/conservative splits on many issues that have merit, but when it comes to net neutrality, I can’t see how any techy person can be against it, despite their political leanings. Why does it matter? Let’s travel back to the days before the internet existed, when people spoke not of ISPs but BBSes…
Back in those halcyon days of the early 90s, when you were connecting to a BBS somewhere using your 9600 bps modem, you were entering a closed community. Sure, you may have had an email address and could send short, simple messages to people outside of your domain. that was the limit of your interconnectedness. The first online service I ever used was Prodigy, back when it was bundled with IBM PS/2 computers. It had help forums, email, and even some shopping, but it was limited to what Prodigy wanted to offer you. When we moved to AOL, it was the same thing: the chat rooms, the IM, the file sharing was all limited to AOL users only.
While this worked well enough at the time, that was just because nobody knew of the alternative: that everything could be accessible to anyone once they were online. As soon as that genie was let out of the bottle, going back to a walled-off community became unthinkable: why limit my forum or chatting to just those people who happen to share my ISP, when I could get information from anybody on any network?
That’s all that net neutrality says: ISPs can’t be gatekeepers and decide what content is available to their subscribers. Some ISPs like AT&T resent the fact that people go to non-AT&T websites for their news and videos, and so they want to charge more for going to YouTube. It seems pretty clear to me that such a limit is a bad idea, especially because most people in this country have little, if any choice as to what ISP they can use for broadband. If broadband internet use were truly a free market with many competitors, this probably wouldn’t be an issue, but it’s not.
Personally, I can’t understand why anybody who uses a computer, no matter what their political leanings, would want to go back to the online experience of using AOL circa 1994. Net neutrality is a good idea.