Uncertainty Wednesday: Pay Extra to Read (Or Fight to Protect Net Neutrality)

Just imagine for a moment the world we can easily find ourselves in. You love my series of blog posts called “Uncertainty Wednesday” but when you try to access it instead of seeing the content, you receive a notice from you ISP (the company you pay to access the Internet), that Continuations is not included in your current plan. You need to upgrade to a more expensive plan to see any content hosted on Tumblr.

This is not some kind of far fetched hypothetical possibility. Without Net Neutrality that’s exactly what will happen over time. We do not need to speculate about that, we can see it in countries that do not have Net Neutrality. Here is a picture from a carrier in Portugal

Now you might say: but isn’t it good if this makes services cheaper to access? What if someone can only afford 5 Euros per month, here at least they are getting some access?

But asking the question this way is buying into the ISP’s argument that they should get to decide which services you can access. Any one of the bundles above effectively requires a certain amount of bandwidth from the carrier. It should absolutely be the case that a carrier can give you less bandwidth for less money. But then with whatever bandwidth you have purchased you should be able to do as you please.

I have explained here on Continuations extensively why Net Neutrality is required for last mile access due to the lack of competition. So I am not going to rehash that again, you can read it at your leisure and so far without having to pay extra.

Net Neutrality is once again under attack. Ajit Pai, Chairman of the FCC, has announced his plan to “restore internet freedom” which is, as it turns out not your freedom as a consumer to use the bandwidth you have purchased as you see fit, but rather the freedom of your ISP to charge you for whatever it wants to.

So if you don’t want to wind up with the Portugal situation from above, go ahead and call Congress. Thankfully the website Battle for the Net makes this super easy. Do it!