I titled this, “Network Neutrality or Network Brutality”. It was written via the form at Save The Internet (check out that site if you haven’t already).

Network Neutrality or Network Brutality

The current state of the Internet in the U.S. is abysmal and it will get much, much worse if we do not guarantee the neutrality of the network. As so much speech exists in the form of bits and bytes it is essential that we guarantee freedom from discrimination on the network it traverses.

Big ISPs do not like the idea of network neutrality precisely because they plan to reserve the majority of their pipes for their own channels of communication. Their vision of the Internet has them as both the carriers of information as well as its source. They want to divide everyone’s connection into two unequal parts: An incredibly fast connection reserved for their own purposes and a slow connection for everyone else.

I ask you, if we allow ISPs to have their own exclusive dedicated connections into everyone’s homes how can any business or individual compete with that kind of access? The answer is that they won’t and they can’t. All it would take for an ISP to crush a business is to start offering the same services over their extremely fast, exclusive connections. Every business that exists on the Internet today will either have to pay the ISP extra for access to their upper-tier channel or will suffer with slow speed into people’s homes.

But it is the citizens who will suffer the most. They will have high-speed access to content chosen for them by their ISP and slow, unreliable access to everything else. Even worse, the voices of our own citizens will be relegated to the lowest class of service. ISPs have absolutely no intention of allowing home users to compete with their own services and will remove perfectly legitimate speech that becomes too popular—just as they do today with unspecified bandwidth caps and unjustified disconnections of service.

We must stop the ISPs before they enshrine these abusive systems into the networks. Before it is extremely expensive to replace them. Before businesses are destroyed. Before citizen voices are choked into irrelevance. NOW is the time to protect America from this threat.

It would be extremely unwise and naive to allow the market to be afflicted by this destructive force before anything is done about it. The FCC must embrace Network Neutrality and enforce it as quickly as possible before the networks are all built and any damage is done. The longer it takes, the more we’ll end up paying.