Can someone explain net neutrality to me like I'm 4?

[XemaSab]

:shrug:

:hi:

[Poll_Blind]

1. If information on the internet were pieces of mail, some people would...

...like for mail from certain places, like big companies, to have precedence over other mail.

So the mail from the big companies gets to people much more quickly while mail from not-so-connected places gets there more slowly.

I think that's what it's about.

PB

[frederickbat]

22. pb

.like for mail from certain places, like big companies, to have precedence over other mail.

So the mail from the big companies gets to people much more quickly while mail from not-so-connected places gets there more slowly.

I think that's what it's about.

[ThatsMyBarack]

23. Welcome to DU, frederickbat!

:hi:

[Donald Ian Rankin]

24. Like being able to buy first-class or second-class stamps? N.T.

[Posteritatis]

31. It's actually the complete opposite of that.

Providers can't prioritize one site's traffic or another (I'm talking the broader level of websites, email, etc., things like throttling P2P and spam filtering are seperate conversations, one of which I'm not sure where I stand on) for a variety of legal reasons, and a lot of them want to be able to, say, make it harder for you to use Google because they've got a contract with Microsoft to push Bing or something.

Net neutrality is more or less the status quo as of most of the net's history, and people are currently trying to end that in order to control what their customers may or may not be able to see without jumping through extra hoops.

[rocktivity]

2. The airwaves--radio, TV, cable, internet--belong to the people by definition

and should not be privatized unless government regulated.

Thank you and good night.

:headbang:
rocktivity

[elleng]

6. Yes but

cable at least does not travel thru 'airwaves,'as do 'regular' radio and tv transmissions, so your definition is incorrect. HENCE a good many of the problems we're seeing now, as permits from govt are not required 'in the public convenience and necessity' which logically enable/demand regulation.

[lame54]

3. Try watching Glenn Beck

[SoCalDem]

4. Corporate entities would parcel out access based on their whims

and you/we would be at the bottom of their list..

Remember when you could go to just about anyplace on the web & read anything with out flashing text-blocking ads?


Those are phase one... what's coming will be far more intrusive..IF you can even navigate the web with the slowed-down access speeds..

The higher payers will have the faster service..

[iamjoy]

5. The Internet Is a Series of Tubes....

and they all lead to your house. Company XYZ builds those tubes. Let's say you want to buy a book online. Amazon is at the beginning end of one of those tubes. I'm just launching my own on-line book selling service, and I'm at another tube. Right now, when you go to the tube in your house and yell, "I want to buy The Cat in the Hat" the Amazon site and my site can make it to your house just as quickly. That's net neutrality. Doing away with net neutrality means XYZ and Amazon can work out a deal in which Amazon pays XYZ more money so that their informaton goes through the tubes more quickly.

Oh, sorry. You said explain it to you like you're 4, not an Alaska Republican.

OK, so you and your friends go to a party and they set out a tray of cookies. Each child can have two cookies. That's Net Neutrality. The other option is, the people setting out the cookies go to the big rich kid and say, pay us a little extra money and you can go to the cookie table first, so you can take three or even four cookies if you want. This means the smaller children or those with no money don't have a chance to get cookies.

[HughBeaumont]

7. Net neutrality = you're informed at great speed without blocks or tiers.

No net neutrality = binary corporatism. 'Nother words - something like this:

[TheBigotBasher]

12. Best explanation of what the internert without net neutrality would become.

[blondeatlast]

29. That is GREAT--and I'm spreading it around, thank you. nt

[GReedDiamond]

8. I have several web sites on my own web servers...

...right now when people go to any of my sites, they are able to download the content on those sites at the same rate as those same people would download the content on a big corporately run site like, say, Amazon or ebay.com.

If net neutrality goes away, if I want my sites to be as accessible as they are now, I would apparently have to pay fees I currently don't have to pay, to buy more bandwidth from telecommunications providers like AT&T, Verizon, etc. If I don't pay for the bandwidth, my sites will be difficult to access by my visitors/users, because the rate of bandwidth will be reduced for my domains, so, for example downloading one of my mp3 music files or a video will be very difficult, as would downloading one of my web pages with a lot of image files embedded on it. In effect, my domains/web sites would be placed in the "slow lane" of the internets toobs...

[pearl]

10. I'll give it a shot

It's about the big corporations getting their grubby, greedy hands on the web to create a cast system of sorts. Charging more for better service and I think some censorship is involved.
They want to turn the web into what they have done to telivision, " a vast wasteland"
I'm sure there's more but it sucks, it as usual involves concentrating power at the top.

[begin_within]

9. Fall down go boom!

[applegrove]

13. LOL!

[Canuckistanian]

11. Regular price for "approved" websites

Extra charge for "dangerous" websites. Oh, and don't expect to download anything that's not on the "featured" list. It'll be blocked or slowed down so much, you'll think twice next time.

Of course, that's one scenario. I'm sure the big telcos have other plans as well.

[Skink]

14. What about porn?

[struggle4progress]

15. It's like when you're at the school playground: everybody should wait their turn to get a chance

to use the swings or seesaws. But suppose the rich kids could move to the front of the line whenever they wanted ...

[TroubleMan]

16. DU would have to pay Comcast in order for Comcast internet users to access DU -

or at least access them without the connection being slowed down to crawl. DU would have to pay AT&T, Time Warner, Verizon, and any other internet provider a fee as well for their users to access DU.

[TroubleMan]

17. Another analogy is imagine if every road in the USA became a toll road -

even the street you live on.

Well, maybe a 4 year old doesn't grasp the concept of toll roads, but I think that's simple explanation of it.

[jberryhill]

18. No, and get out of this restaurant

If parents can't explain net neutrality to their own kids, I don't see why I have to put up with it.

[d_r]

19. "Because I said so."

[Festivito]

20. When we ask, we should receive.

That is: when we ask for a website, we should receive it, then, when we ask.

We, as a people, usually only have one connection to the net from our house.

Hmmm.

That means the company delivering those websites to our house can try to squeeze more money from us to give to themselves. We could buy more than one net connection from our house, but that would cost us double if not more than double. So, they figure they can charge us, more, just not quite double -- double what they currently charge.

Hmmm.

So, those companies want to tell their computers, not to deny, just to slow down the delivery of certain websites.

Then they tell us that we need to pay more to get faster service. And, they tell the website people that they have to pay more to get their website to us faster. See how they can try to collect money at both ends? Money they do not really deserve.

So, the companies spend extra money trying to tell the computers to slow us down, then those same companies tell us that what they really need to do is to make bigger connections between themselves and the big websites, and that is why it will cost more. Then, the companies spend a little more money and go to Congress to make it legal for them to slow us down for more money, er, ah, in order to provide better service from certain websites. And, they give the Congress-critter more money to run again and they do not run another Congress-critter-would-be against him in the next election who will take their money for slowing our net access.

Once it is legal, then all the companies join in and they all slow service and they all collect extra monies...

But, we, us, at home no longer even have a choice of a second connection to the net that will give us fast service when we ask. Even if we pay double, triple, and so forth.

In the future, since we have no real choices between connections from the net to our homes. The price will go up. Some websites may be slowed further. Someday, they will try to stop some websites altogether. Why do you need to research that candidate? Look at how responsive this candidate is.

We lose.

Net neutrality. Because, when we ask, we should receive.

[Major Hogwash]

21. Stay off of your Mommy's computer, she has real work to do, it's not a toy.

Like you're 4.

LoL

[BootinUp]

25. Quite simple really

Do you want corporations to decide how the internet works or do you want individual citizens through their government and through their choices of how to use the internet to decide?

If it is left up to corporations, it will evolve to serve the haves and the have nots will not have it at all or it will not be worth having for them.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

26. You're at your browser. You have two tabs open, one for the Wal-Mart site and the other for DU.

Your ISP delivers you the data for both tabs as they arrive there from their respective servers.

Net neutrality means they have to forward the data for both in an equal fashion. No deliberate delays or differentiated limits. The only limit they can place is in your overall usage as a customer.

The same applies to the people running the links leading to your ISP, the hosting company that have the sites themselves etc.

[blondeatlast]

30. I kind of thought that was how it operated but somehow it didn't make sense.

But I suppose not making sense is the big idea.

Between yours and Huh Beaumont's explanations, I finally get past the idea of it to the actual mechanics.

thanks.

[Posteritatis]

32. Think of it as similar to how telephones work

Well, landlines at least; we'll leave cellphones out for the purposes of the conversation, if just because as a Canadian if I start talking about cellphones a profanity-laced rant about the companies up here will quickly ensue.

Assume I call your landline from my landline. Also assume we're both in the US for these purposes, just to make that part simpler.

It doesn't matter in the least what phone company we each use; the call will go through barring physical damage to the lines. If I have no long distance plan, I will of course get billed for it, but the rate at which I'm billed will have nothing to do with the company you get your phone service from, since the actual owners of the wires the signal's going through don't matter for that purpose. If I'm a subscriber of Company X, you're a subscriber of Company Y, and Company Z owns a 500-kilometer stretch of phone lines in the middle through which our conversation goes, Z does not get to impose any restrictions, additional billing, or so on for either of us to be able to communicate through their lines.

An equivalent of that where, instead of telephones, a conversation, and the phone network, we've got two computers, some data, and the Internet's infrastructure is the general idea of what constitutes Net neutrality, and has also mostly been the status quo since the Internet first started filtering into the public in the late eighties. My ISP, and yours, and most others in the US and Canada don't get to charge customers extra for visiting particular sites, or telling subscribers of Company X that they can't visit Site Y because they have to travel through Company Z's servers to get there. Now, this is exceptioned all over the place - throttling P2P bandwidth is the most common instance, and blocking spam is generally seen as a public good to anyone who isn't a spammer - but it's generally the way things work.

People who are arguing for Net neutrality are generally trying to maintain the status quo. In some cases they're wanting to push it a bit further by having ISPs explicitly classed as common carriers in the same way telephone companies are in the US. (I would love this, but I'm so not holding my breath. Canada has already profoundly lost that one, with a few ISPs planning to charge end-user rates to customer ISPs for the use of their networks, and that's before getting into the bandwidth quotas.) People who are arguing against Net neutrality would like to do away with that, whether for naive libertarian reasons or for the sake of more actively controlling and restricting what can be seen or done online.

[jeff47]

27. IMO, electricity is an apt analogy

Right now, the electric company provides a certain amount of electricity to your house. What you do with that electricity is up to you. If you need more electricity, you have the power company upgrade your service and you get more.

This is what the Internet is today. And it is "net neutrality".

Now imagine that the electric company wants more profit. So they decide that if you want to use the electricity to run a Kenmore refrigerator, you have to pay them an extra $10/month. Whirlpool refrigerators are $20/month. GE refrigerators have no surcharge, because it so happens your power company is owned by GE.

Due to a fluke of the electric grid, your power happens to pass through wires owned by another electric company. So not only do you have to pay your electric company, you have to pay the one in the middle too.

In addition, the power company goes to Whirlpool and demands $10/fridge/month in order to supply electricity to their fridges. And if Whirlpool won't pay, then the power company won't give their fridges enough power.

That is the model ISPs are trying to create, and it is not "net neutrality". They've attempted to confuse the issue by co-opting the same term for their side of the argument.

In theory, it gives them enormous profits because they get to charge consumers and producers additional fees.

However, we already had this model once. Back in the dial-up days, they did charge you more for certain services. Then some ISPs came about that did not charge extra. Prodigy and the other early ISPs that up-charged quickly died. So even if the current ISP behemoths switch to a non-net-neutrality model, there will be other ISPs that do not. And with WiMax and other 4G technologies rolling out, the existing ISPs lose their monopoly of being the only ones with wires to the house. 4G means wires are no longer relevant.

Non-net-neutrality might have been a workable business model 5 years ago. But technology is making that window shut very quickly.

[yowzayowzayowza]

28. Tiz like an electric company selling appliances that work better...

due to providing competiting appliances with less service.

Close? :shrug: