Saturday, November 24, 2012

Regulating the Internet

When you think of Internet regulation, the first thing that may come to mind is China's Internet restrictions, but certainly not any type of regulation in the U.S. 

Keeping the Internet "fair" is hard to do, especially when Google and Verizon make plans to better the web. The problem was their plan involved many loopholes that didn't seem to make access to the Internet fair for everyone. 

Over the years Wi-Fi has become popular, but people still use wired connections to go online. In the proposal, those who had a wireless connection would be offered faster Internet speeds in order to access information faster. That is not the only exception. What if Verizon partnered with a company that streamed videos, and only those who used their service were able to access faster streaming? 

Making the big sites load faster will not help, and it certainly will not help with net neutrality. Smaller sites won't be able to function if their page takes more than a minute to load. We live in a time where everyone wants their information immediately. Even waiting 30 seconds for a web page to load is too long. The majority of blogs would not be able to publish daily postings. 

Imagine I had posted some controversial news on this blog, but because of Verizon's idea of net neutrality users weren't able to quickly access my blog so they went to other bigger sites that provided them a one sided story. My one piece of advice for Google and Verizon for the next time they come up with a proposal for net neutrality, "don't be evil."

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