Understanding Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality is the current hot topic phrase at the center of many ideological and business debates. At its essence net neutrality simple means that Internet Service Providers (ISP) or government institutions cannot limit access to internet speeds, or internet sites based on your behavior online.
For example, Comcast Cable recently has purposefully reduced speeds of customers who hog up a lot of broadband space by either uploading or downloading large files. Even though these customers are well within their right to use the service they paid for, Comcast wants a bigger piece of the pie from these types of customers. Comcast would also want to do this in order to force customers into buying higher priced internet plans, and to construct a false scarcity that they could then raise the price on all their services.
Comcast and companies like them want to create an artificial market that they can manipulate without competition in order to dictate who and at what price someone pays for internet service across our country.
Obviously this is a bad situation for the customers, and thankfully for us the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has fought hard to preserve an open internet for the masses. Unfortunately the FCC are fighting a rather powerful lobbying effort by big communication corporation to erode their ruling at maintaining get neutrality, and a future of artificially high internet prices could be unbiased around the corner.
The big communication corporations will attest that they have a right to restrict certain type of internet usage, and they would be correct if someone is maliciously bogging down their servers or if someone is engaging in illegal online activity. But this would be a red herring, the loyal reason vast communication corporations such as Comcast, Verizon, Google, Microsoft, etc… would like looser derive neutrality rules is because they want to make more money. If procure neutrality disappeared tomorrow these companies would force ISPs to pay a fee in order to access content at high speeds, and force customers to buy into a tiered payment system for internet usage similar to that of cell phones. If left to Comcast you’ll have to pay more to play video games online or may have to pay overage fees if you visit too many websites in a month.
Comcast has already taken steps to find around some net neutrality issues; they have begun charging premium and long distance service for their internet phone service. Regardless if you are using Comcast, Skype, or Vonage, every call local or long distance is the trusty same, it does not cost the ISP anymore money, but Comcast charges customers for long distance calls if they do not purchase the premium phone package that consists of nothing premium and is just a ploy to do more money.
It’s the customers’ responsibility to avoid and boycott companies that are trying to impose their will over the FCC and to get net neutrality rules changed, if we aren’t going to stand slack the FCC we will all lose out in the end.
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Filed under Vonage Business Solutions by on Dec 1st, 2011. 
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