A long, long time ago,
I can still remember when the thought of net neutrality used to make me smile.
And, I knew that if I would write, then people might actually visit my site, and…
Maybe I could reach the world.
But, January made me cry, my content may no longer reach new eyes
The court of appeals have spoken – the internet is broken.
Now ISPs can charge a fee (Verizon, Comcast, AT&T)
To pages who don’t just don’t agree, the death of neutrality.
I started singing, bye bye this collective minds’ eye.
Now my traffic’s something tragic, cuz providers deny
Bandwidth to all the sites they despise.
How are they going to get by?
How are we going to get by?
A very depressing day, indeed, for the internet now that providers no longer need to treat all content roughly the same way. The Court of Appeals struck down the FCC’s 2010 order that ISPs “shall not block lawful content, applications, services or non-harmful devices, subject to reasonable network management… [ISPs also] shall not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful traffic over a consumer’s broadband Internet access service.”
Now ISPs can do just that — keep users from visiting competitors’ sites by diminishing their bandwidth or coercing sites to pay unnecessary fees to get the same bandwidth they once got for free. This is horrible for small business and only benefits these telecom companies who are now going to be able to turn an even higher profit without improving the internet at all.
Now ISPs like Comcast, owner of NBC/Universal, have the legal right to slow down any video streaming they’d like. I wonder if they could stand to benefit from such an arrangement? Netflix and Hulu prices may very well soon go up to offset all the fees they’d have to pay to ISPs.
The internet ain’t what it used to be, with the NSA browsing our shit and with ISPs creating an unfair advantage. The internet used to be a place where everyone had a voice. It seems like that’s going to change soon, unless some miracle happens.
It ain’t right.