Net Neutrality-Wait...What?

Imagine sitting on your sofa nursing a bout of COVID, binge-watching Game of Thrones. In the last episode, when Jaime and Cersei are about to meet their demise…your signal starts lagging. You check your cables and your wi-fi connection and even look out the window, hoping to see some explanation of what or who is ruining your life. Whom you didn’t check was the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC for short. Because they repealed the net neutrality rules that allow you to binge-watch your favorite show, at least for the rest of your day, or maybe never, you won’t find out that your favorite characters have bitten the dust.

What is Net neutrality, and how does it affect you? To expound on this, we have to start at the beginning with the basics. In the beginning, or 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Communication Act of 1934. This federal act regulated wired and wireless communication so that they were treated the same way. This Act has been changed, renamed, and amended various times over decades, but it still brings about the debate on its necessity and the overreaching hand of the federal government. To sum it up, the Act says that all communications must be treated equally, regardless of their content.

The original rules regarding the internet or broadband were implemented in 2015, during the Obama administration, but now it has been rolled back. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/technology/net-neutrality-rules.html?smid=url-share This means that all that bandwidth you are using may come at a price. Even more so, you may not even be able to stream your favorite shows…even if you are willing to pay.

This situation brings into remembrance the “pay to play” or payola scandal in the music industry back in the 1950s- 1960s. Payola was the practice of paying a radio station to play certain songs or not to play certain songs. The FCC eventually placed strict regulations on the use of payola, making the practice illegal, but in some cases, it is still being used today. With that being said, the repeal of net neutrality makes it possible for industries to pay under the table to ensure the competition doesn’t get a seat at the table. With the repeal of net neutrality, your favorite original on Amazon Prime could be blocked by Netflix conglomerates or vice versa.

Unfortunately, the repeal of net neutrality will also cause issues in the Natives communities, which are already at a disadvantage economically. With service providers having the option to charge what they want to charge; many Natives will no longer have basic access to the internet. What The End Of Net Neutrality Means For Native Communities | HuffPost Impact

Net neutrality has a giant political shoeprint, and your stance may directly result from the party you associate with. Not everyone believes that net neutrality is a good thing, and that companies should be able to charge additional fees for usage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiZ8xwwycXA. While I am not a fan of overreaching government, and I feel like they tend to stick their noses where they don’t belong (ROW vs. WADE), I feel like regulation in some situations is mandatory. I believe that net neutrality is necessary, and all traffic should be treated the same in most circumstances. There are times when it should be overruled or adjusted, like during the pandemic when students were forced to learn from home and needed a secure, stable internet connection. Net neutrality would have needed to be adjusted because one individual’s need to soothe their soul with To Wong Foo, and Godzilla vs. Megalon, on a Friday afternoon should never take precedence over little Jimmy taking his mathematics final.