People are faced with choices and decisions every day. What will I eat? Should I start working on my assignment or go to my friend’s birthday party? What colour underwear do I feel like wearing today? Some choices are much easier to decide than others, but all these examples express how we have the power over our own choices. Having said that, everyone would agree that we have the power to choose what websites we visit, when we visit them and what we can see on these websites.
We choose to log into Facebook daily to seek information. We choose to go on MSN Messenger whenever we want to, and we choose the people we get to talk to. Net Neutrality allows all of this to happen. Net Neutrality prevents our internet providers from building a firewall between you and the websites. For example, you are walking down a beautiful forested pathway and you see a delightful white fluffy kitten rolling around in the grass in your path. You know that kitten is dying for you to pet it, and you know all you want to do is pet the kitten. So you approach it and reach out your hand but a giant brick wall forms from the ground, making it impossible for you to pet the kitten. You now feel ripped off. The kitten represents a website you are trying to access, and the brick wall represents the firewall that the Internet service provider has set up so you cannot access the website.
Without Net Neutrality, we will no longer have a choice to view what we want to. Net Neutrality is a big issue in the United States. In November of 2007, then Senator Barack Obama discussed in Mountain View, California that if he is elected the new U.S president, he wants to continue to support Net Neutrality. “The Internet is perhaps the most open network in history, and we have to keep it that way.” Barack Obama is now the President of the United States, and if he keeps his word, which millions of Americans hope that he does, then Internet choices in the U.S will be in the hands of the users and not the providers.
Net Neutrality is evidently a serious issue that affects not only the States, but everyone world-wide. It is important that Internet users support Net Neutrality if we all still care about choice, and the freedom to browse whatever we want whenever we want.
YouTube. "Barack Obama on Net Neutrality". November 14th 2007. November 22nd 2008. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-mW1qccn8k>
Schmidt, Eric. Google Help Centre. November 22nd 2008. <http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html>
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1 comment:
You begin this post very effectively by emphasizing choice. When readers go on to read about the possibility of losing net neutrality, they are probably already invested in the idea of choice from your beginning, which makes it likely that they will be sympathetic to your cause.
Keep writing,
Lana
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