The fight for net neutrality gets some corporate support

Sep 5, 2014 11:48 GMT  ·  By

The other day we were reporting about the upcoming protests that seek to draw attention to the risks Internet users face if net neutrality isn’t protected. “The Internet Slowdown” campaign has gotten quite a bit of traction and support from some rather big names.

Etsy, Mozilla, Kickstarter, Wordpress, Vimeo, Imgur and Reddit are just some of the sites that have agreed to join the protests by adding banners and other loading icons to represent what would happen with the traffic coming from companies that have not paid for access to the fast lanes.

Evan Greer, co-founder of Fight for the Future told The Guardian that net neutrality is a tough concept to explain to most people, but an action that actually shows the world what’s at stake should be easier to understand.

“I think the three most hated words on the Internet right now are ‘Please wait, loading…’ Unless Internet users unite in defense of net neutrality, we could be seeing those dreaded ‘loading’ wheels a lot more often on some of our favorite websites, while monopolistic companies get to decide which content gets seen by the most people,” he added.

As you may know already, net neutrality is the concept that says that all content should be treated the same. That means no prioritizing, no speed throttling, no access restrictions. What US service providers want right now is to be allowed to cash in extra money from companies desperate to get their content to users in a speedy manner, even though they are already supposed to offer proper speeds to their clients since they’re paying for web access.

One example about how things shouldn’t be done is what has happened to Netflix. Following months of poor service due to Comcast and other ISPs throttled the company’s speeds, the company saw itself forced to sign peering deals for its content to use the network’s full speed.

Creating these so-called fast lanes without actual technical improvements to the network is impossible and it would simply mean that some companies get to pay to have access to the actual network speeds and face no throttling, while others would get slowed down so that a difference is noticed between the two.

While ISPs keep saying that such practices would be in line with the net neutrality concept, things couldn’t be further from the truth. Aside from the fact that some sites and services would get slowed down, there’s also the risk of having the ISP tell you what content you can access and what content you should avoid by simply tweaking the net speeds.