Net Neutrailty: The debate that shouldn't be

In my own experience, the real issue with the net neutrality debate is the problem of it being deemed a debate in the first place. It comes off as some kind of awkward argument on behalf of common sense in the face of a greedy agenda. It's almost easily likened to the pre-abolition slavery debate: sure it's effective, gets (some) people what they need, but it pads the pockets of the privileged at the cost of natural rights of others (note: I said almost; slavery's worse than losing net neutrality). But, I digress. There's a problem with infrastructure (be it political, industry, telecom, and everyone else implicated). The success and profitability of a technology (the internet) is almost solely reliant upon the general pedestrian public. And yet, the public is oblivious to the issues surrounding their rights of use, access, and potential to gain a foothold later. Worse yet, it's the old issue of having phone and telecom companies grow and grow and eventually get out of control (it's happened before). Where is the room for a rival to Google or Yahoo if such a site can't serve up anything?

To stick to one problem, it is this idea of access and ranking. It's easy to speculate that the right telecom lobbyists are buddies with the right recording industry lobbyists. While I know ISP's save money by throttling someone's World of Warcraft connection, they'll get more out of dumbing down file sharing (which "helps" record industry exec's - or so they're convinced). But, let us say that file sharing is not the agenda (and whether or not we believe this idea is another issue entirely).

There remains this issue of having to declare what neutrality is, or whether it's okay. The attitude is worryingly reminiscent of McCarthyism. Since when did equality become so dirty? How did we (as a country) forget that so many of the tech industry giants of today were the startups of the 1990s? And some much newer than that! Where would a fledgling social network for college students out of Harvard, MA wind up if it were just two guys at Harvard pushing it, but with no decent bandwidth or internet-connectivity compared to larger rivals like MySpace and Friendster? "The Social Network" would make a different movie if it had a part about getting decent bandwidth from the ISP to stop being slow and ignored.

I for one am not advocating that a standard home user should get the same download and upload rates as a server farm for their pay. Far from it. But they deserve equal access. If Yahoo and Google pay for high speed connections and servers of comparable quality, then it follows that a user on a standard connection can access them similarly. And, moreover, that a third party could move in and try to do the job better with the right resources, without bias in connectivity. If another server exists for download purposes, or users want to connect peer-to-peer, then the same should apply. It's their internet, they pay for it, let them use it how they want: content and sharing is an afterthought, better not to mingle these issues.

It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense; it must make sense to someone, on paper. But the issue then is that these policy makers are all too often the computer illiterate. Then again equality is the name of the game, right? But, policy makers are in a higher position of authority. So, shouldn't they at least learn what they're talking about? Lest we have more "dump truck"/"series of tubes"- quality conclusions, or (worse yet) logic along the lines of that which brought on the court ruling that RAM may be used as a legal record/document (in spite of the fact that RAM is temporary). The contradiction is blatant enough to more computer-savvy users. Don't they have a place at the table here?

The bitter truth is: There are parts of government and ISP companies that would prefer that the public have their internet the way these "providers" want them to have it. For a fee, the public should check their email, and not download music. And, if a company wanted to sell music, then as a business they should have to pay for that (by this thinking). They think this service should still cost the people money. I say: you can't have it both ways. Control a service or sell that service. And, if it's got to be a controlled system, then make room for those of us who'd like to build an open one. We have the technologies, so it's only fair. It's our right.

In response to:

Why You Should Care About Network Neutrality by Tim Wu
Architecting Civil Liberties from Protocol Politics by Laura Denardis

For reference: Appendix