Life After Net Neutrality
For the past few months, in the United States, a fight has been brewing over how the pipes that control the Internet would be ruled. On one side, activists and large Internet companies felt that access to the Internet should be neutral and that all sites should be accessed in the same fashion. On the other side, large cable and phone companies have been arguing that they should have a chance to charge different rates for different types of services. The whole fight was embodied into a campaign called Net Neutrality and made its way into the American congress. Today’s news that the Net Neutrality bill was defeated may create future problems for American internet businesses but will not kill the Internet, as some have claimed. Instead, it will probably dictate, in the long run, the death of the very proponents of a ban on net neutrality: phone and cable companies which have been trying to overreach in their attempt to fatten up their bottom line. Looking at the stakes At issue in this debate is how bandwidth is distributed and whether it should be metered in any fashion. At the current time, in the US, most people who get…