The Pros And Cons Of Net Neutrality

537 Words2 Pages

First, the mechanics of the internet must be understood in order to understand the argument of Net Neutrality. Internet Service Providers (ISPs), are the actual channels of the internet which provide suppliers of content and services (CSPs) to consumers (IUs) (Kramer). The Net Neutrality debate, or more appropriately the non-net neutrality debate, was first sparked by Ed Whitacre, the Chief Executive Officer of ATT in 2005 after his statement, “Now what [content providers] would like to do is use my pipes for free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it” (Kramer). He was referencing CSPs such as Google and Yahoo projecting a limitless and unregulated amount of bandwidth to be processed over ATT servers. ISPs, including ATT, express concern about the proposed rules of Net Neutrality that would prohibit it from slowing competitors’ web traffic or accessing content (Shatz). By not allowing the ability for ISPs to regulate its network and the bandwidth that moves through it, it can cause a variety of problems that un...

Open Document