I recently sent a letter to my district representatives for congress expressing opposition to net neutrality. I said that it created a double standard to allow organizations independent of the federal government to have control over how data can be delivered. A double standard, because of Libraries. Now, I quoted the ALA which is not government affiliated but that has a library bill of rights and believes in free and open information.
This morning, I saw this article about net neutrality and it renewed in me an appreciation of the ramifications of the previous ruling by the US circuit of appeals.
The entire basis on net neutrality is on the idea of free and open communication, not regulated by any ruling body. However, the rules over censorship sometimes stop after the government. Yet, any noise over a medium of communication hurts the overall message. What happens? The message is delayed, stopped, or slowed. In our day we come to expect a speedy message. Now, traditional Media outlets will need to rework their channels of communication to make up for potential noise along the line. This bottleneck, I can only see runs the risk of losing money for businesses and ending up in more anti-trust cases down the road. I have no idea what is in the minds of the businesses at the head of the net neutrality cases. I think businesses are only thinking one to two steps ahead. Maybe it will help promote their immediate partners, but what about the partners of partners that own distribution and buy their products from other partners that also are business partners with Pepsi when said other partner company has a partnership with Coke and throttles their lines of communication. Of course, it may or may not be this simple or complicated. My point or my question is: did they really do their research?
The Federal government does not want to make a point in addressing this. I make parallels to the NSA. Could a company funnel communications by the NSA now that the government cannot regulate ISPs distribution of information? In an aside, this may be a win for the public in the NSA spying cases. Yet, aside from the NSA, Does this heap on even more double standards when government funded institutions such as libraries are throttled against providing certain information over others?
I am interested in seeing what will happen with this.
Scott's Blog 