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The Pros And Cons Of Net Neutrality

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“Net neutrality shackles the internet with rules and regulations designed for the bygone era of the black rotary phone rules that made sense in 1934 but not today”. This is a quote from Brian Paul who is a reporter from “The Mercury News” which is based in San Jose, California. Net Neutrality is the idea that all internet service providers should treat all lawful internet content equally and it is restricting the dynamic and ever-changing landscape of modern computing. Although, on the other side of the argument many people like Tim Berners-Lee who is known to be the creator of the world wide web say “Neutral networks are critical to ensuring fair, open competition in the content market and driving America's growth in the digital era”. It is …show more content…

Although many people say that “net neutrality has had no effect on the expansion of the internet”. In 2017 The Federal Communications Commission announced "For instance, several companies, including AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, and Alaska Communications either commenced or announced new deployments in 2017," the report concludes. "These new deployments are initial indicators that deployment is likely to accelerate again in part due to our recent efforts”. This tells us that companies are starting to accelerate the growth of their broadband networks to rural places in the United States. This is necessary due to people who have access to the internet have a higher achievement rate than people who did not. The Pew Research Center reported, “Roughly one-in-three adults with less than a high school education did not have access to the internet as a kid”. This is an astonishing statistic and net neutrality is stopping these companies from expanding so it is leaving some people in the dust with their education. Secondly, net neutrality slows investment by giving the companies no reason to invest in internet expansion because they cannot bring back the money that they put into the expansion. In 2017 wired.com did a report on internet expansion in rural areas and the report said: “investment in internet infrastructure declined 3 percent in 2015 and another 2 percent in …show more content…

Although many people like freepress.net argue “Net Neutrality keeps the internet free and open — enabling anyone to share and access information of their choosing without interference from companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon”. Prior to that happening, the internet was policed adequately before net neutrality ever even existed. According to washingtonexaminer.com stated in one of their articles “The North Carolina-based Madison River Communications was fined by the FCC in 2005 for blocking Voice over IP phone services. This behavior still won’t be tolerated in a net neutrality-free Internet age, and consumers will always have remedies available to them.” This proves that the internet was fine without net neutrality because if a company refused to let a basic service through they would be sued by the FCC on freedom of speech and blocking legal content. Continually, net neutrality is bad because it made it more expensive for laws that were already being enforced to be enforced. In 2016 the FCC report said, “The Commission requests $388,000,000 in budget authority from regulatory fee collections to carry out its core statutory mission and Congressional mandates.” This is up from 2004 when net neutrality didn’t exist when it said: “In order to develop our request for FY 2004, we began with a base funding level or Budget Authority of $268,327,000”. This is a clear increase because the FCC would

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