A world without net neutrality?
The mission of the Federal Communications Commission is to study and maintain the fluid integration of all the technology related to communication. According to them, the reason they remove net neutrality in 2017 is to encourage competition between companies which would benefit US infrastructure and economy.
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The real effects on the economy
According to the Commission, removing net neutrality will improve a country's infrastructure and economy.
This is not entirely correct.
This is not entirely correct.
The competition mentioned by the FCC is when internet service providers are able to put different prices on different services such as YouTube or Netflix, people would be inclined to pay more or at least find a provider that offers the best deal. This creates competition between the service providers. |
This might be the case for a short time, but the problem lies in big internet service providers. These service providers are not afraid of losing a bit of income by lowering their prices so low that smaller service providers can not keep up. These small service providers can not risk lowering their prices to align with their much wealthier competition and they will be forced to cease operations. There will inevitably be no competition if the market is dominated by two or three huge companies that control everything that is put on the web - it would be a monopoly of the internet. We will returned to what it was before the death of net neutrality, only now people can legally censor what we see on the Internet. |
The effect on us
After the major providers have taken absolute control of internet service, it is likely that the citizens of the country will be affected.
Yuval Noah Harari discussed this problem in his Ted Talk "Why fascism is so tempting and how your data could power it". According to Yuval Harari, "politics becomes the struggle to control the flow of data" and if information becomes too centralized, people would be able to manipulate our emotions. Following this he says that "fascism exploits our vanities" because it is the emotions that are the weakness of democracy.
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Relating to net neutrality, even if the information is not centralized, it will actually be in the hands of internet service providers. With the power to censor and slow down all online websites, it is surely frightening that providers are able to manipulate emotions by showing only what they want us to see. It is likely that the absence of net neutrality will be a threat to any democratic country. |
The absence of net neutrality can surely affect the way we learn on the internet - especially in the education system.
All this can influence the education of students. On a free internet, students learn to distinguish opinions from facts and then determine if the facts are reliably or unreliable. Being able to do this process is an important skill among youth in a democratic country as they will be the adults who will make the decisions in the future. If providers limit what is shown on the internet, this would affect the development of decision-making by teenagers by upsetting the spirit of democracy.
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The effect on a country
Once a country has blurs the line between opinion and reality, children will be forced to grow up without being able to understand the distinction. Without knowing it, the democratic spirit suffers enormously, because future generations will have trouble making critical decisions under the influence of a biased internet.
China is an example of a country that has never had net neutrality. Since the 20th century China has still been censoring and all those who oppose their communist ideology; moreover, the Chinese people are also removed so that the people are obedient to the communist and fascist spirit. Some instances include the 100 Flower Campaign and Tiananmen Square where Chinese people who thought differently then the government were killed.
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This is not to say that a country falls to dictatorship the moment it removes the neutrality of the net. But this massive loss in freedom will be a huge step towards fascism and a definitive blow to the democratic spirit.
Neutral Net
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