Net Neutrality and The Internet As We Know It: What are they and how do they actually relate to one another. #Trigger Warning, Controversial Opinions Within

It has come to my attention that some people on this site don't understand how the internet works, at least here in the US of A. Those of you who stumble upon this blog who aren't from the US are invited to stick around and maybe learn something. Maybe you won't. Maybe you already know all of this. Or maybe you will read this and deny and disagree with what I'm trying to say. That is your own business, and for those of you who are US Citizens, it is also your Right as protected by the First Amendment. I won't begrudge you yours, so all I ask in return is that you don't begrudge me mine.

The issue I'm going to discuss is actually something I've been aware of for a while, what with the general age-group of Bronies and Pegasisters falling within the "Millennial" bracket, myself being one of them, and also knowing what I know about how the Fake News Media and the United States' broken education system has done to implant certain ideas in our minds, but that's a rant for another time.

For now, what I want to discuss is Net Neutrality.

Now, many of you reading this probably already know that the FCC and President Trump are making another attempt to pare down and ultimately do away with a regulatory law known colloquially as "Net Neutrality". Net Neutrality was advertised to us as "Protecting Us from Profit Grubbing Internet Service Providers" wanting to gouge internet fees as well as regulate and throttle internet speeds through price wall subscriptions and "Pay Per View" limits to the internet.

As I see the facts, there are two things wrong with the arguments out there against getting rid of Net Neutrality. The first, is that they are repeating the misinformation that has been given to them about what Net Neutrality actually is, and the second is that even if the Regulations and the Internet as a whole worked the way they think they do, that ISPs suddenly blocking access in the ways they think they would is simply bad business and in some cases contractually illegal.

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For our discussion on the Business aspects of getting rid of Net Neutrality and why it is highly unlikely that what so many seem to be fearful of would come to pass, I'll start off by explaining how the internet works.

We start with the Internet Service Providers (ISP) who host website information on their server farms. These companies are sometimes one and the same as whoever provides your internet at home, or a subsidiary or branch thereof. Sometimes they're separate companies who specialize in webhosting only, and they pay royalties to the Distribution ISPs, but we start with the Webhost ISPs because these are the companies who host and store the information for every .com, .org, .net, .gov, .&c that you can access through your browser.

They host server farms that hold all of this information and companies, interest groups, and individuals alike all pay these companies a fee to not only host this information, but also claim their web address domain as unique, as well as make that site available to the greater Internet at large. Some of these Webhosts provide different levels of service to their customers depending on how much their customer is willing to pay, with higher prices meaning that that website gets bumped up to a higher-grade server that can store more data and/or handle more Browser traffic. The reason for the higher cost to the customer is simple; the more powerful, higher priority server costs the ISP more money to install and maintain, and if they don't provide the level of storage and bandwidth service that the customer is paying for, then the business, interest group or individual is allowed to pull out of the deal and look for a Webhost ISP who will.

There are two ways these companies, interest groups and individuals offset this cost to themselves.

The first, and by far most common is through advertising. Other companies pay webhosts or the companies creating the web site royalty fees to run adds, which then draw anyone who visits that site in to view and occasionally purchase their product or service, which pays for the royalty. When it's the Host being paid by the advertiser, the adds usually are run as part of the agreement between the customer and the Host where the customer is allowed to put up their site for either a reduced cost or "Free" in return for mandatory advertising blocks imbedded within their URL script. When it's the customer being paid by the advertiser to advertise their product or service directly, it's called endorsement.

The second method that the Webhost is paid is through subscriptions and pay walls for particular services on the part of the customer that would otherwise be withheld from anyone simply randomly browsing through, and that's simple capitalism. They provide a unique service, and in return expect to be paid to provide it. Expecting to enter these sites without paying the fees would be like expecting to be allowed into a theater (Movie or Broadway, take your pick) for free. These sites usually lack the "banner adds" you see everywhere else, but not always, as running more adds usually means more advertising revenue for them.

It's unlikely that Webhost ISPs would be where the concern for "artificial pay walls and/or throttling" could come from because they are already contractually obligated to provide a certain level of service to whoever they're hosting a site for. Artificial throttling of bandwidth below their contracted allotment to the individual site could see them in court, and adding an additional pay-wall above whatever their customers may or may not already have would lose them customers, as those interests either leave to find Host services that won't put up the paywall, or will invest in the infrastructure to host and connect their site on their own.

As for Distribution ISPs, such as whoever the individual pays every month to keep their house or apartment connected to the internet, I'll let Popular Talk Radio Host Mr. Rush Limbaugh lead off:

One of the best analogies I could give you on this. The pro-net neutrality people have come up to analogies to try to help people understand what they think they’re trying to propose. And they use Federal Express and Amazon as their illustration. And they say FedEx delivers Amazon’s packages, and they’re all treated the same. No package gets any preferential treatment. FedEx gets the packages, they deliver them.

Nothing could be further from the truth! Whether you’re talking about Amazon or Shmazon, you can choose your delivery speed, you can choose how many days, weeks, you can choose the kind of delivery you want, do you want ground, do you care if it doesn’t take a month, do you want it tomorrow, do you want it in two days. All of that depends on how much you are willing to pay.

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If you want the fastest internet you can go out and ask if your provider provides gigabit Ethernet. And if he does and you find out what it costs and you want to buy it then you d*** well expect that your download speeds with gonna be gigabit ethernet. You’re paying for it. If you don’t care how fast your internet speeds are, you can go el cheapo.

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It does not mean that certain people are gonna be given preferential treatment. It means that you will be able to buy whatever service you want and the provider will provide it. And if the provider doesn’t provide what you’re paying for, then you have recourse to cancel, get out of it, go somewhere else.

Rush Limbaugh - Nov 27, 2017

I couldn't have really said it any better, but boiled down all it means is that you get what you pay for, for the same reasons that Webhost ISPs provide what their customers pay for; installing and operating a higher rate Ethernet or Fiber-optic line costs them more to maintain, and in return for incurring the higher expense on the individual customer they are contractually obligated to provide what they say they will, or else the customer is entitled to leave and find a better ISP.

The same analogy actually applies to ISPs specifically targeting certain sites too, both for artificial throttling and additional pay walls. If your ISP decides that it's going to target a specific site or service that you want to connect to, whether it be written media such as Fimfiction  or Kindle, or video streaming like YouTube or Netflix, and their customers find out about it, they have every right to pull out of the contract and find an ISP that won't cut off their access and that such actions would open themselves to litigation. In addition, putting up these restrictions opens the market to new ISPs to either be established or to move into an area from outside in order to take advantage of the consumer vacuum created by the other ISP, and while more competition is good for us, because it drives prices down, it's bad for them for the same reason. Again, that's capitalism.

Now, I do understand that some people don't actually pay for their internet. Some people live close enough to a McDonalds where they can log into their WiFi, some live on college campuses where their internet is provided by their college, and some live in cities or areas of cities that provide free public WiFi, and some live with their parents who likely pay for their internet for them and therefore decide which ISP to use. "You Get What You Pay For" still applies to you however. People who get their internet for free from public access WiFi make the choice not to go out and find an ISP of their own, and people who live on campuses or with their parents have the ability to appeal to either their campus staff or parents to switch their ISP to something less restrictive. It won't always work, but there's also the option to move off campus or out of their parents' home and get their own ISP that way.

"But I can't afford my own place/Internet", or "But I'm disabled and can't move out" some might say. In those cases, there really isn't that much that can be done, and I'd argue that you've probably got bigger immediate concerns than where your internet is coming from.

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Now, to understand what Net Neutrality really is, we must delve at least a little into the history of communication regulations through the history of this nation.

Fun Facts; did you know that we could have had Cellular Communication in the Fifties? Or that legalizing FM Radio was held up in the system for twenty years because the companies that controlled AM broadcast lobbied enough control to shelve it? That, right there, is the history of telecommunications in the US. The History of telecommunications in the US is littered with the Government and other interests trying to regulate and control how we communicate with each other, and how we receive NEWS and other information, and more often than not new methods and technology are only allowed to spread when these interests are no longer able to contain them. Sometimes the reasons for trying to contain a new form of communication have been commercial, but more often than not, especially in recent years, they have been driven by political agendas that wish to control and limit not only how we receive our information, but what information is most readily accessible to us.

Before about two years ago, The Internet was not regulated. The FCC had no regulations that governed over it and Net Neutrality did not exist. To put it simply, this is the free and open internet that we all grew up with. This is the internet that gave us everything from 4Chan to Redit, to Fimfiction to Equestria Daily, to all of your University Web Hubs, News Sites such as CNN or Fox News, to etcetera and everything in-between. There were no rules or regulations over what could or could not be put on the internet, other than what moderators for individual sites said was acceptable, and the only necessary financial obligation to access the internet in recent years was to the individual or business purchasing the service from their ISP once we started developing better means of accessing it than dial-up (I wonder how many of you remember dial-tone?). There was no tax on your internet bill, such as the Title II regulation tax you see every month on your phone bill because there was no regulation saying that the government could tax internet use.

To once more quote Mr. Rush Limbaugh:

The internet, remember when it first started, when people really, really got into it? I’m talking about being able to browse websites, the first browser was Mosaic, then Netscape came along with theirs, and everything was free. Newspapers published websites with the exact content of their published editions and more. Everything came online. Everything, data and information being added, and nobody was charging anything for it, which was their big mistake.

They created the idea that if it’s on the internet, it’s free. Now they’re having to charge for it, put things behind pay walls, they’re having trouble because of so many years. But the point is, it wasn’t regulated and look how fast it grew. And look how fast the tech improved. And look how widespread available it became.

Rush Limbaugh - Nov 27, 2017

There were two factors that lead to this explosive growth, and Rush mentions one of them here; the lack of oversite. The second reason which Rush mentions elsewhere, and by and large the reason behind this total lack of oversite, was because everyone underestimated how explosive the Internet's growth would actually be, and so steps were not taken to preempt it from the beginning as happened to other forms of communication in the past.

The thing about Net Neutrality, is that it is misnamed. There is nothing "Neutral" about it, because the Government controls it, and by its nature as it has transformed through the years, the US Government is one of the least "neutral" institutions in the world due to the various political parties and interests vying for power within it. They decide what ultimately gets regulated and what doesn't. Because of how explosively the Internet grew, Net Neutrality can't get rid of ISP bills or Pay Per View services or charged subscriptions unless the Government tries to nationalize the Internet like they're trying to do to Healthcare, a process that would be arguably just as costly to both the government and taxpayers at this point due to how widespread it is.

I pay my internet bill, and there are a couple services that I pay for. I'm sure more than a few of you pay for Hulu or Netflix' streaming services, and Net Neutrality hasn't changed that. Net Neutrality doesn't really do anything except make ISPs who can't lobby the FCC to relax its regulations on them specifically unhappy, but otherwise it's more of a nuisance to them than anything else. What Net Neutrality is actually about, however, is its use as a means for certain interests in the government to get a foot in the door to regulating internet content and distribution more thoroughly, and in some cases, perhaps more than some of you may think, as a means to cut off and punish the free voices of the internet that don't agree with certain political agendas by regulating search options or censoring content outright for not being "Neutral" or "Politically Correct" enough.

From there it only snowballs down-hill until either the Supreme Court get involved over First Amendment Rights violations, or we end up looking at the inside of a United States equivalent to "The Great Firewall of China" where the only allowed voices mirror the political interests in power, or worse, "North Korea .Net" where citizens need special dispensation from the government to even access the internet, and the only accessible sites are all outright propaganda feeds.

Of course, that would be a totally worst-case scenario, and I'd wager money on a "Second American Civil War" breaking out before it reached that point, but the possibility is out there.

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This has been Controversial Topic; Signing off for Now