A group called Protect Internet Freedom is hoping to score laughs and support against government regulations of the web with a satirical clip (below) made in a porn movie setting. It comes amid a debate on the planned net neutrality regulations by the FCC.
Net Neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differently by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication.
I wrote about Net Neutrality last year, after President Obama promised that it Internet speeds would remain equal for everyone.
Protect Internet Freedom, the group that uploaded the video to YouTube, argue that the Obama Administration’s plans to put the internet under government control by classifying the internet a public utility would take power away from the consumer, website developers and small business owners. They say such a move would drive up costs and slow down innovation.
The belief is that government control would ultimately lead to “fast lane” users, those who would pay a premium to have their content delivered to home computers. Fast lane users would likely be corporations that are able to pay more than the average user, or small business owner. Those who could not afford to pay the premium for the fast lane, would see their content bogged down and load slowly, causing those who access the slower websites to abandon them and ultimately end up on the faster loading websites.
A comparison of data delivery speed would be cars in a race. Currently, the slowest car might do 180 mph, while the fastest car can race at 200 mph, with all other cars between those speeds. If “fast lane” ability happens because of wanted government regulations, it could result in just a few cars being ungoverned and able to race 200 mph, while the other cars would be restricted to 20 mph, unless they paid a higher entrance fee.
Examples of net neutrality violations include when the internet service provider, Comcast, intentionally slowed peer-to-peer communications. In 2007, one other company was using deep packet inspection to discriminate against peer-to-peer, file transfer protocol, and online games, instituting a cell-phone style billing system of overages, free-to-telecom value added services, and bundling.
Critics of net neutrality argue that data discrimination is desirable for reasons like guaranteeing quality of service.
On Wednesday this week, FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, unveiled his plans to ask the FCC to accept a proposal that would let data delivered over broadband internet be regulated under Title II of the Communications Act, which will regulate the internet as a utility, and ban fast lanes.
The FCC has been working for nearly a year on new rules governing how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) manage web traffic on their networks.
The FCC is set to vote on the regulations on February 26.
Disclaimer: On January 4, 2016, the owner of WestEastonPA.com began serving on the West Easton Council following an election. Postings and all content found on this website are the opinions of Matthew A. Dees and may not necessarily represent the opinion of the governing body for The Borough of West Easton.
