You'll Pay For This Someday.. (Literally)

            We live in a culture that relies heavily on our technology and the internet. I can think of multiple times where I’ve talked to my parents about researching something to where they have replied with, “When I was a kid there was no such thing as google, we did all of our research out of a book!” While I’m sure a lot of the kids in my generation have heard stories similar to this, it would be impossible for us to change how we were taught to do school work. We were raised around technology that has continued to grow over the years and become the most important factor in our social lives, business, and education. There is a current proposition stating that the government would like to take away the freedom of technically-free internet. While we currently have to pay the fees to Mediacom or whatever provider serves you, this gives you service that unleashes the entire internet at your will. This Net Neutrality act would take away that freedom and you would likely end up having to pay for the websites that you use as well, sort of like cable.

Personally, I don’t see how anyone could find this a good idea being that there are many benefits to net neutrality in America. The first being that anyone with access to a laptop can use the internet, and there are many places where people without computers can use them as well, such as public libraries. This makes it easy for people without jobs or the finances necessary to afford internet to fill out applications being that a lot of businesses have gone paperless. In my own endeavors of finding a job, more than ¾ of the employers I applied for had online-only applications. We can’t expect the unemployed to find jobs when they have to pay for the websites simply to access the application. Another reason behind this would be in the realm of education, in relation to college tuition. Americans spend unreasonable amounts of money on college tuition in comparison to other countries, and to tack on the bill of having to pay to use the websites necessary to research as well as to do homework and turn in assignments would make paying for our educations even more of a burden. While this is important so is openness of the internet, the right to have free knowledge at our fingertips. My generation especially is constantly being told to educate ourselves, stay tuned in to current issues, and see the effect that we are having on the world and our culture. These things are sometimes impossible to do without use of the internet. While not everything you find on here is true, it is essential that we still have access to it because under certain circumstances when one cannot afford television, there is no other way to hear except through the grapevine, which is probably more unreliable than the sketchy websites you can run across on the internet.

On a website called gizmodo.com there is an article I found called How to Explain Net Neutrality to Your Relatives: A Thanksgiving Guide. This article, written by Eric Limer, puts this whole situation in lame terms and makes it easier to understand just what is going on so that you can simply explain it to your older relatives that are not as technology savvy. They use the metaphor that when you buy cable through a provider you pay for certain channels as a package and if you would like extra channels, you have to pay for them separately; This is essentially what the blocking of net neutrality would be doing. An internet service provider would benefit from this largely because they would be able to charge each us for each individual website, or make a good amount of money with packages that grouped websites into categories. Not only would they be able to charge us for the service of having the signal to pick up the internet, but they would also be able to charge as much as they want for the packages because we need to use the internet. I have a theory that if the FCC decides to block net neutrality a lot of people are going to lose it, start riots, ruin a lot of things. Recently, when something with the government doesn’t go right, people riot and I honestly expect nothing less from this. We have to wait quite a while before we get the decision on this issue, but I think this could ruin a lot of business and money towards the economy that run solely off of the internet. There is a lot at stake here and I’m glad I informed myself on the situation for it is definitely something that could affect our society as a whole.