Young Writers Society

Even since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed President Obama’s Net Neutrality, or equal access to the internet, life has been falling down to the worse for a anxious-stricken, mental, and depressed teenager named Kara. She was also very lonely -- because she put off negative energy and was anti-social, so nobody wanted to be friends with her. Therefore, she turned herself into a more “positive” version of herself in public and cried in private. That is, until she found a website that she could be herself without changing herself as a person. She made many new friends on there and she wasn’t as lonely anymore. Then, she realized that some of the people at school were on the same website so she had real life friends as well as internet friends. She was surrounded by people who actually cared about her and it really helped her mental issues. However, when Net Neutrality was repealed, the website took longer to load then it used to and Kara, being impatient, can’t really access the website anymore unless she would pay for it. Now the people that she had surrounded herself with disappeared one by one until only her real life friends were left. She can’t speak as herself anymore. She fell back into depression, anxiety, and other mental issues and disclosed herself from other people. Therefore, the FCC should bring back Net Neutrality because without it, the economic balance will fall farther apart, the neutrality rules out website discrimination, and the basic rights of America are threatened.

If there is no Net Neutrality, the economic balance will fall apart; to put it simply, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. For example, rich corporations such as AT&T and Verizon can charge money to allow access to certain websites that they either don’t like or don’t trust in the form of download speed. However, the poorer citizens that want to access those said websites aren’t able to pay it, unlike when someone would have Net Neutrality; when they wouldn’t have to pay for certain websites. That means that the lower class will try to keep accessing it until the higher class forces the poor to pay. Then, the rich corporation receives money that it doesn’t really need and the poor who need the money lose valuable money; the Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, charge high amounts for certain things: websites, videos, downloads, etc. Therefore, if the lower classes want those privileges, they are forced to pay money to the people who don’t need it. In some cases, they can’t, for paying means bankruptcy, and they can’t access the information. Also, the ISPs can control and restrict the amount of websites, videos, and downloads that are being produced in their flow zone, which enables them the ability to inadvertently command smaller companies with what could be an iron fist. According to the University of Delaware, 81% of people disagree paying the ISPs (Martin, E. J., 2015) to access their favorite websites that they want or need to visit. That is why the economic balance will fall farther apart if there is no Net Neutrality.

“Imagine a new travel-booking website that always loads slower than Kayak or Orbitz. Impatient customers will quickly give up on it, and the new site will fail.” That quote was directly from the Washington Post’s article on Net Neutrality, “How to Argue about Net Neutrality.” That is exactly what website discrimination looks like. Website discrimination is when richer corporations support other richer corporations and leave smaller, startup websites in the dust, causing them to fail. This has happened without Net Neutrality at least several times, when the larger companies paid a lot of money for faster downloading and loading speeds. However, the smaller companies can’t, since they need to use their money for other things, so they fail. Additionally, President Donald Trump also disproves of website discrimination; there was a recent case that President Trump didn’t approve on where AT&T decided to buy Time Warner, another big corporation. President Trump didn’t like the deal and created a whole case on the possible monopolization, stating that it was “Too much concentration in power in the hands of the few.”{How to argue, 2017} Since Net Neutrality is repealed, other larger websites will have the power to do deals exactly like the one mentioned above, or the exact types of deals that President Trump hates. This will cause the smaller companies to have even less of a chance than they had before to start off a company. Ergo, website discrimination should be decreased at all costs.

What is Freedom of Speech? To most, that is a basic right in our country. But to Internet users, it is the ability to access websites to speak their own mind. However, without Net Neutrality, websites can be slowed down to load after hours of waiting, which affects the ability to say what we want to say, which, as mentioned, is a basic right in our country. For example, if somebody impatient wants to talk about politics online on a website that the ISP doesn’t agree with so it’ll take a few hours to load, they’ll shut it down after a few seconds and not be able to speak their mind on the internet. However, if a supernaturally patient person wants to talk about politics online on the same website, by the time it loads they’ll most likely forget about what they were going to talk about. That also removes their freedom of speech. Robert Larson of Dollars and Sense claims, “In a world where Netflix and Yahoo connect directly to residential ISPs, every Internet company will have its own separate pipe.”{Money Yells! Market, 2015} Companies can slow down any website that they don’t agree with, such as a pro-Hillary website if they’re pro-Trump, and disallow any (especially impatient) accessors from accessing it. This prevents a pro-Hillary citizen to have access to the the website that they want, preventing them from supporting Hillary. That is not freedom of speech. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is also threatened as well, since cables can control the flow of information by forcing consumers to pay money, and if the consumers can’t pay, they are neglected from the information. Therefore, the FOIA is threatened.

Some people claim that we don’t need Net Neutrality for several reasons. First of all, the problem didn’t exist in the first place; for example, slowing down websites rarely happens, even if the possibility has been around since the Internet first began. There have been only four incidents where this has happened, all before 2007. However, slowing down websites can happen, and since corporations were pushed back by Net Neutrality for years, they might seize the new power and use it before the possibility that Net Neutrality will come back again. “But without Net Neutrality,” anti-Neutrality activists say. “There are driven down prices of things that are bought from the Internet, such as goods on ebay and Amazon. It provides faster downloading speed. For example, Europe has Net Neutrality and Europeans have slower downloading speeds than Americans did with Net Neutrality. Even if Net Neutrality was enabled, different factors enable different downloading speeds and different prices.” Nevertheless, the higher product prices aren’t nearly as much as paying for certain websites to access with faster speeds; they’re only one or two more dollars more. As for downloading speed, if Europeans, with their greater population, can handle slower downloading speeds, Americans can too. “Still,” the activists claim. “The law doesn’t say what you can or cannot provide with the internet. Besides, the problem didn’t exist in the first place.” Yet, President Obama and the government added Net Neutrality to prevent a future problem in the first place. As the saying goes: “better safe than sorry.” Despite that, the FOIA does apply to the internet. Even if it doesn’t say the Internet specifically, it still applies there. Therefore, Net Neutrality is needed to maintain a peaceful internet.

Net Neutrality provides happiness to ordinary people such as Kara. For them, they could spend money on things that they really need. They can start up their own small companies; any company that they would like. Finally, they have the ability to say what they want to say on various websites. That is why the FCC should bring back President Obama’s Net Neutrality; to protect the rights and money of ordinary citizens everywhere.