A Super-Simple Way to Understand the Net Neutrality Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?
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For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.
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One theory of the case, and the one that the Obama administration embraced Monday, is that the Internet is like electricity. It is fundamental to the 21st century economy, as essential to functioning in modern society as electricity. It is a public utility. “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” the president said in his written statement.
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Comcast, my cable provider, offers me a menu of packages from which I might choose, each with a different mix of channels. It goes through long and sometimes arduous negotiations with the owners of those cable channels and has a different business arrangement with each of them. The details of those arrangements are opaque to me as the consumer; all I know is that I can get the movie package for X dollars a month or the sports package for Y dollars and so on.
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just as your electric utility has no say in how you use the electricity they sell you, the Internet should be a reliable way to access content produced by anyone, regardless of whether they have any special business arrangement with the utility.
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Those arguing against net neutrality, most significantly the cable companies, say the Internet will be a richer experience if the profit motive applies, if they can negotiate deals with major content providers (the equivalent of cable channels) so that Netflix or Hulu or other streaming services that use huge bandwidth have to pay for the privilege.
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It would also give your Internet provider considerably more economic leverage. It would, in the non-net-neutrality world, be free to throttle the speed with which you could access services that don’t pay up, or block sites entirely, as surely as you cannot watch a cable channel that your cable provider chooses not to offer (perhaps because of a dispute with the channel over fees).