Risk of Illegal Activities in Net Neutrality

“Net Neutrality' is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.” - Ted Cruse. Books, movies, speeches, religious seminars, newspapers, magazines, and many others are all types of speech sent over the internet and therefore, should be protected from government laws by the first amendment. But, with net neutrality, all data would be treated with the same speed and bandwidth, making way to get consumers faster internet speed or bandwidth to reach their conduits of speech illegal. This is a violation of our first amendment, and it may be that the FCC, or the Federal Communications Commission, doesn’t even have the power to enforce its internet policy statement, greatly reducing the seen power that the FCC has on regulating many parts of internet pertaining Net Neutrality. In the court case of FCC vs Comcast, the court ruled that “the FCC did not have the authority to regulate an internet service provider’s (in this case Comcast’s) network management practices and vacated the FCC’s order” The First Amendment states that the government or government organizations should have many less powers pertaining to laws that affect religion, free speech, the press, and the right to peacefully assemble and/or petition the government. 

The Court Case of Comcast (An internet Provider) and the FCC (the federal communications commision with laws pertaining to internet Neutrality) was that the FCC could not fault comcast for putting large bandwidth neighborhoods into a lesser priority for a small period of time to slow down their internet , but the FCC said that this conflicted with their newest internet policy statement. The courts ruled that Comcast could not be charged with the FCC’s policy statement and did not have to comply with the FCC’s demands, even in a time when Net Neutrality was in order. Net Neutrality is the idea that all internet service providers must treat all data with the same priority, and cannot raise or lower prices or speed based on based on type of equipment, website, user, content, platform, source address,method of communication, destination address, or application.The term was first coined in 2003 by Tim Wu, a Columbia University media law professor as an extension of the term “Common carrier” mostly used when talking about telephones. Net neutrality was mainly inadvertently followed by all companies, until they soon figured out how to work around it, something legal at the time, and legal today, due to there being so few laws then, and people figuring out it works better now. Net Neutrality should not be reinstated for the United States because Net Neutrality laws are expensive for internet providers with burdened and overreaching requirements causing the internet to actually loses growth due to investors being under more risk, even though Net Neutrality laws can make it easier for newer internet providers to develop.

Net neutrality laws are expensive for internet providers, even without noticeable change or impact on information net neutrality was supposed to improve.In fact, century link had to do an estimated 5,000 extra hours of paperwork due to net neutrality, costing them $134,000 each year.Many Net Neutrality laws actually exceed the supposed reach of the FCC, meaning they are making laws about items they should actually have no control over.The editors of National review stated neutrality rules exceeded 'the agency's statutory mandate,' and that 'there is no title or provision in the Federal Communication Act that gives the agency a clear mandate to impose pricing and content-management rules on Internet providers, which is what net neutrality does.'(Should Net Neutrality Be).The idea of all information being broadcast with the same priority also violates the first amendment in the way of how net neutrality affects the price of speech transmitted on the internet. If you wanted to send a piece of online speech (book, email, call, etc) you would have to send it with the priority of all other data with net neutrality. But, if you wanted to increase the priority your online speech uses, to say transmit the data faster, you would be violating net neutrality, meaning companies cannot sell deals packaged for each specific type of data, and can only sell all data equally.This also increases the price for the data as a whole, as only a few people might use all forms of data, but they cannot reduce the price of the bill as a whole by not purchasing unneeded data sets

With Net neutrality, it increases the risk for inventors that might otherwise invest in internet companies.With the amount of investors left making sure to pick the choice with the smallest risk, most oftenly snowballing into making large companies really good for investing with smaller ones seeing less investments.Net neutrality also does not take into account the quality of the data it affects, only that each amount of data is equally prioritised. This would be as if every single book ever printed had an equal number of copies, with the worst books the public has no interest in having a massive surplus, and the best books having way too few copies to satisfy the demand.(Net Neutrality, Uniformity,)“The Constitution does not guarantee a right to be equally heard as much as everyone else, but an equal opportunity to speak in whatever manner unabridged by the law.” - Alex X. Galloway. (Net Neutrality, Uniformity,)John Thorne, senior vice president and deputy general counsel of Verizon, has stated that no companies will want to invest in advanced fiber optic cables to increase the speed of internet services if they cannot increase the price for this service as well.Jeff Pulver, a VOIP pioneer, knows that there is a lot of uncertainty around the FCC imposing Title II, with many companies he helped start were holding back investments due to the uncertainty of in the FCC will use Title II to halt VOIP startups from bypassing telephone networks.

Net neutrality makes it so that new companies can start up on the internet without larger companies stopping their services from reaching the new company in a quick manner.If Net neutrality would be in effect, large companies like google and safari could not slow down speeds to smaller companies websites that advertise the same services as their browsers. This slower speed might halt people from waiting for things to download, or cause negative brand perception. 'broadband providers will be allowed to charge all websites and services, including startups, simply to reach an ISP’s subscribers. That's a huge threat to the low cost of starting a company, and it totally up-ends the economics of the internet.' - Ryan Singel.(Should Net Neutrality) The problem with this argument is that many smaller start-up companies don’t need protection from the l;arger internet companies as much as they need protection from the government. According to a Wired magazine article by TechFreedom's Berin Szoka, Matthew Starr, and Jon Henke, local governments greatly overcharge newer ISPs, along with absolute power on if the ISP can even build a network or not. Public officials set some benchmarks that need to be met for the ISP to get the “Public right of way” which is basically if the ISPs can start putting down wires or not. Kickbacks may include things that directly benefit these local governments and not their people such as giving government buildings free access to their internet or even “donating” equipment. These local governments are also trying to shift the blame away from themselves by pushing the few public eyes towards how larger companies, like AT&T's U-Verse, Google Fiber, and Verizon FiOS, may be shifting the priorities of smaller companies’ websites.

As can clearly be seen, net neutrality laws burden internet providers with overreaching requirements,causing the internet to lose growth by their investors being under more risk, making reinstating Net neutrality for the US a poor idea in many regards.Century link had to do an estimated 5,000 extra hours of paperwork due to net neutrality, costing them $134,000 each year, due to complicated net neutrality requirements.The editors of National review stated neutrality rules exceeded 'the agency's statutory mandate,' and that 'there is no title or provision in the Federal Communication Act that gives the agency a clear mandate to impose pricing and content-management rules on Internet providers, which is what net neutrality does.' (Should Net Neutrality)And that “The Constitution does not guarantee a right to be equally heard as much as everyone else, but an equal opportunity to speak in whatever manner unabridged by the law.” - Alex X. Galloway