Why Net Neutrality Matters
If Ajit Pai, Chairman of the FCC, has his way, the internet could be a very different place before long. He announced Tuesday a plan, to be voted on in December, that will completely gut the Net Neutrality laws that have been in place since 2015. Gulps.
In case you aren’t aware of what that would mean, let me break it down for you real quick. Right now I pay Frontier a flat fee to have internet delivered to my apartment at a certain speed with no restrictions on what site I can access or what kind of services I can utilize. That’s because of net neutrality.
Without net neutrality, it’s much trickier. Frontier would be well within their rights under the new laws to charge me an extra $5 a month to access Twitch or to watch Netflix or to play games on Xbox Live. The above picture is a mock up I found on Reddit that paints a grim reality of our future without net neutrality in place.
I don’t know about you, but that looks absolutely terrible. While there are certainly some of you out there for which this may not matter as much — although, who doesn’t watch Netflix these days — for someone like me whose line of work is entirely based on the internet, this is terrifying.
Both of my jobs at the moment are pretty much directly centered around Twitch. Just about every esports event is broadcast on Twitch, meaning that’s my destination for everything I do as a writer. When I’m not writing, I’m streaming on Twitch from my own channel. Basically Twitch is a home base of sorts for everything I do these days.
While the picture above is only a mock up and not a certainty, there is no doubt that most of the sites and services that revolve around gaming will be relegated to the highest of tiers in the absence of net neutrality. Streaming and playing video games requires a ton of bandwidth, and ISPs will not want to give that away for cheap.
This essentially means that unless I find a completely new line of work and give up gaming (and our precious Netflix), it’s about to get real expensive up in here.
The scariest part of this whole ordeal is that the majority of people who will be voting on these new laws are Republican, meaning that it’s pretty likely that this will pass come mid December.
Even scarier is that the FCC will also order states to scrap any plans they have of net neutrality. It’s going to be the FCC’s way or the highway essentially.
While it may feel like a certainty, there is still time to have our voices heard. You can contact your senators to let them know that this matters to you. Who knows, if we get enough people to call and email, we could manage to prevent this from becoming a reality.
This is one of the best resources that I’ve found as to how you can go about calling and making your voice heard.
Here’s to hoping that we can enjoy a free internet for some time to come.