Net Neutrality – Why You Should Be Paying Attention

Well, so far net neutrality still exists. The White House Office of Management and Budget signed the net neutrality rules. For those that don’t know what that is and why you should care, I’ll explain. ISPs, (Internet Service Providers), want to control which websites can offer fast content and which ones should be provided a slower connection. That isn’t how they would explain it, but that is the real truth behind it.

In the beginning of what most people know of the web, say around 1994 and later, large corporations thought the Internet was sort of a fad and not to be taken too seriously. For instance, companies like GM and Chrysler and Ford didn’t see how owning cars.com or autos.com might benefit them.

They figured their traditional advertising and brand recognition were enough. Then they saw domain names selling for millions of dollars that were generic, like cars.com, business.com, etc. Their next step was to try to get laws passed to ban the ownership of generic domain names. Their IP lawyers said that it was unfair that these companies spent millions to advertise and brand their name and that someone can just register a domain name for $10 per year and compete with them.

They lost that battle, thankfully. There must have been someone in the justice system who actually remembered that free enterprise means that anyone can compete with anyone.

Now the corporations are attacking equality from a different angle. They want those corporations that can pay more to be more accessible to consumers than those companies that cannot afford the extra fees. ISPs love the idea that they can charge for premium speed Internet for companies who can afford to pay more and regulate the bandwidth, or speed, of websites owned by companies who cannot afford to pay more.

This would move the bigger companies and corporations ahead of smaller companies and give them an unfair advantage over smaller businesses. They couldn’t block small companies from competing with them because of generic domain names, now they want to stifle smaller competitors by making their websites less accessible than their own.

One example is that with net neutrality in place, an ISP like AT&T cannot make your Gmail load slower than your Yahoo Mail just because Yahoo is a partner and pays them for doing so. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it? Big corporations don’t think so. They believe that if they have more money than a smaller company and can make deals the smaller company can’t make, then they should be able to stifle competition if they want to.

When someone from a large corporation talks about letting the free market decide, they mean only when it is to their advantage. The free market and free enterprise gives you the right to succeed and the right to fail, yet these same corporations don’t mind the government bailing them out when they fail to run their company properly.

Too big to fail is a lie. In a free market, when one business fails to meet the demands of consumers, other companies, some of them new startups, will be there to fill the demand or void left by the failed company no matter how big they are. So when you hear them talking about letting the free market decide, remember, they mean let it decide whenever it is in their favor.

Large corporations want to block small businesses from competing with them. That is a fact. They even believe they have a right to do so. We spent more money to advertise therefore it is unfair for a company that spent less money to compete with us. That sentence has been used by corporate CEOs and IP attorneys to defend the way they try to block smaller companies from competing fairly.

Net neutrality is a battle that everyone who uses the Internet should be watching and getting involved in. Imagine trying to do research and not being able to access certain information simply because the company providing that information can’t afford to pay what other sites are paying.

Imagine not being able to get a better deal on products and services because the smaller companies that provide those services and products cannot be found as easy as the bigger companies who can now charge even more because they are your only choices since your ISP made a deal with them.

That’s what will happen if we do not keep net neutrality in place. Unfortunately, the ruling that was passed did not cover wireless connections. Wireless providers like AT&T will use that to their advantage and consumers will pay the price for it. They plan to challenge the ruling on net neutrality through the courts, saying the FCC has no authority to regulate Internet usage.

So, basically, AT&T and those who want to eliminate net neutrality are saying that our government has no right to stop them from stifling competition or anything else.

By the way, the vote on net neutrality was right along party lines. 3 democrats voted to keep the Internet neutral and competitive and 2 republicans voted that corporations and ISPs should be allowed to do whatever they want, including creating a fast lane and a slow lane on the web, with small businesses being in the slow lane.

Keep that in mind when elections roll around.  They do this under the flag of not letting the government interfere in business. Again, this only applies to when it benefits them. These same people who oppose net neutrality, supported the bailouts of corporations who mismanaged their companies. But I guess bailing them out isn’t interfering.

Why is all of this important to an SEO Company like mine? Load speed of a website is one of the factors that ranks sites well in Google and other search engines. Without net neutrality, those that can pay more will have faster load times than those that can’t. Many of my clients are small business owners and not big corporations.

It was important that SEO clients could get generic domain names and I helped fight that battle as well. Large corporations already influence how you find things on the web. They control the board of ICANN, (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), who choose which TLDs, (Top Level Domains), can be introduced, such as dot biz, dot info, etc.

Companies like Network Solutions influence ICANN as to what they should or should not approve. And to top it off, let’s say you wanted to start a new TLD, like dot CPA or dot Atty, then under free enterprise, you should be able to do so.  And according to ICANN, anyone can do just that . . . as long as they can afford a $180,000 application fee with no guarantee of being approved.

Now do you see how this affects you and how they keep small business owners from competing in a fair market?