Letters to the Editor
Net neutrality deserves protection
Suppose a small newspaper wants to make a bandwidth-intensive website. Without net neutrality, it’s a no go, because the media conglomerate that owns the tubes wants to promote their own “news services.” It would be like TV today. Want some news? Tune into CNN, FOX or MSNBC.
As someone who looks at user-submitted videos, peruses political blogs, reads Wikipedia and supports investigative journalism, I disagree with how Keith Yost compares a company’s ability to section off the internet with a company’s ability to make electricity pricier during peak demand. Eliminating net neutrality is more analogous to empowering an electricity company to choose which appliances you can cheaply use — this would obviously reduce the wealth of electrical devices available to the customer. The internet’s diverse richness is best protected with net neutrality.
Yost claims net neutrality will lead to a slower internet. But currently in South Korea affordable 20Mbps broadband is ubiquitous, and Australia is planning to build infrastructure to cheaply provide citizens with a constant 100Mbps. 100Mbps is enough to stream 20 HD videos at the same time — plenty for the forseeable future of the Web. Given that, I would rather have net neutrality, and preserve equal access to all types of content, than a marginally higher speed or lower cost for only services Comcast and NBC say are important to me.
Nils Molina ’14