I’m not gonna lie; I live in a pretty closed bubble when it comes to politics. Before this semester, I didn’t really pay attention to the news. When I logged onto social media, the only kind of news I got was about rescued dogs and celebrities. This semester, since I’m taking Ethics and Gender and Pop Culture, it’s been impossible to stay away from the news and the stories of today’s world, and I don’t want to stay away. Hell, I downloaded Twitter just so I can stay up to date with news (Laura laughs at me for this), but someone in my Gender class suggested that it’s a really good place to get news because most of the top stories are fact-checked and are confirmed by many reliable sources. I’ve taken to reading theSkimm, so I get a snippet of what’s been happening each day in my mailbox. I don’t want to not know what’s happening in the world anymore, especially after I learned about Net Neutrality months too late. Ever since Melina and I were the “peer experts” for the Internet Age in our Gender class, Net Neutrality’s been on my mind. I wondered why something so important was never brought up in our Ethics class, especially since the banishment of Net Neutrality is set to occur on April 24th, but I later saw that we were going to be speaking about it this week. I’m excited to hear about some of my classmates POVs, particularly those of more conservative leanings. In my Gender class, the students are overwhelmingly (and unsurprisingly, given the topics we discuss in this class) left-leaning, and everyone wanted Net Neutrality. Given what we know, Net Neutrality is essentially the idea that ISPs (and there are only like, 5 major ISPs) cannot limit or block (or speed up) content that they agree and disagree with. Basically, it allows for the Internet to be free with government regulation. Big companies that take up a lot of broadband, like Netflix, Facebook, and Google, as well as start-ups, and the general public are huge advocates for Net Neutrality. On the other side, we have Trump’s new FCC, the ISPs (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast), and basically any person who agrees with all of the president’s opinions. The cases against Net Neutrality are pretty unconvincing. In the Being Libertarian article, the writer slapped down the “400 pages of new regulations” put in place by the FCC for Net Neutrality but didn’t even bother saying what these pages contained. It felt like some sort of ploy to get people to be scared that it seems so heavily regulated but didn’t even talk about what any of those pages said. At the end of the article I was kind of like, “Ok, so … are they going to talk about their argument against Net Neutrality now?” And I get it, libertarians basically don’t like government regulation, so I guess if the Internet is regulated by the government, it’s bad, right? This is bold, but I’m pretty sure if these same regulations were somehow put into someone else’s hands (or maybe many hands, to make it seem less like being controlled by a single entity), they would no longer have a problem with it. Or maybe if the FCC was actually chosen by the people so they represented the people they are making decisions for, there would be less problem because it’d feel more democratic. But I digress, since the people on the board are selected by the president and confirmed by our red senate. I guess those people were elected officials, but why can’t we also elect representatives for the FCC? Anyway, moving on from that, if it isn’t obvious, I am a proponent for Net Neutrality. Sure, it’s probably not perfect, and I haven’t read the 400 pages of regulation set in place, but it sure beats the idea of letting ISPs run wild and block any websites they want from showing their content to its users, particularly when the ISP map looks like this (with green indicating access to 1 ISP and blue indicating access to 2+): Yeah, so what are we supposed to do if we can’t access our favorite sites? Switch to an ISP that likes them? Ha. Well I guess you better hope that you actually live in an area that lets you do that. The Internet, though provided by these few ISPs, is a public service and fair access should be a basic right. We should be allowed to view whatever we want. I want to get both sides of a news story before forming my own opinion. I don’t want to only know the left-leaning side because I have to pay in order to learn about both sides. I don’t want to be controlled by the ISP I’m forced to have because the competition between them is so abysmal. I think about John Oliver’s Net Neutrality segment and I worry extensively about living in an age where the Internet could no longer promote movements that were started and propagated through the Internet, like BLM and LGBTQ communities. So yeah, I want my Internet to be regulated by the government (“the biggest, most powerful monopoly in the world!!!”) if that’s what it takes to keep these other ISPs (read: other monopolies, just privately-owned) from controlling what I can and cannot see.
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AuthorJulianna Yee. Archives
March 2018
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