Net Neutrality

The Internet, once a novel and alien concept, has integrated itself into every facet of life extraordinarily quickly with nearly 89% of the adult U.S. population using the Internet by 2018. In fact, that percentage, in under 20 years, has jumped a little under 40%. The great success of the Internet comes with the ease of accessing information from anywhere at anytime. The need for this to remain a part of the Internet spawn the term known as Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality’s principles must be upheld for the wellbeing of the Internet and its many users, and despite the ubiquity of the Internet, it is still a commodity to be sold. The Internet, as a product, is sold by corporations in the form of specific telecommunications companies known as

Not all dangers, however, were unseen; the more prevalent and noticeable threats like malware and scams caught the attention of many; however, the growing community around the Internet would soon learn that there was a larger risk that threatened the Internet on a foundational level. The Internet, out of principle, was supposed to facilitate the open and liberated transmission of Internet on a global scale; this was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C believes that the Internet, as it is known today, was “invented as a communications tool intended to allow anyone, anywhere to share information” (World Wide Web Consortium). This idea of a truly open Internet, where no one entity would be able to suppress another, was seen to be vulnerable by Tim Wu. He released a paper in 2003 titled: “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination.” In the paper, he discusses the various approaches to implementing Net Neutrality, and why it is important. He deems Net Neutrality important on the basis of ascribing the Internet to be “a platform for a competition among application developers” (Wu 6). It is because the Internet must be competitive that Net Neutrality is important. If Net Neutrality was not followed, large corporations could dominate the Internet and crush the free market of the Internet. That ideal, free Internet were the

One of these organizations had been the intended target of Wu’s original paper, Congress. In 2008, they were given a CRS report, assembled by Angele A. Gilroy, under the title: “Net Neutrality: Background and Issues.” In the 6 page report, she defines Net Neutrality as “the general principles that owners of the networks that … provide access to the Internet should not control how consumers lawfully use the network” (Gilroy 1). Her definition matches that of Wu’s, and so does her explanation on why Net Neutrality is necessary. The importance, she emphasizes, is that the “network providers’ ability to control access to and the pricing of broadband facilities … [places] unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage” (Gilroy 2). If telecommunications companies are allowed to control and limit what legal services their end user may access, it would effectively, not only go against the principles of the Internet, but also remove competition from a market which desperately needs it. Just two years later, in 2010, the ACLU also released a report on Net Neutrality named: “Network Neutrality 101: Why The Government Must Act To Preserve The Free And Open Internet.” The report, while simultaneously reiterating many of the points already brought up in Wu’s paper and the following Congressional report, also puts Net Neutrality in the context of supporting free speech. Prefacing that