Open Internet - Current Internet Issues

As we are presenting our law and society projects this week, and some of us are just receiving our new Chrome Books, I wanted to share a case about the issue that is going on right now with the internet that pretty much effects everyone. If you don't want to read this big paragraph, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxMyTwmu_M

So basically the internet we think of is called "Open Internet" or "net neutrality" which means that the internet has general public standards where anyone can access or share things and everything flows relatively the same. This means huge website companies like Facebook or Google flow at the same rate as a new small start-up company's website. The problem is that internet service provider companies like Comcast want to make money so they want to make companies like Facebook or Google  pay them in order to get faster loading of their pages. So for example if you get a Comcast plan that says your internet loads at some amount of megabytes per second, Comcast can make pages load at lower amount of megabytes if the website isn't paying Comcast, which means the non-paying pages load slower. Which means you only really get the amount of megabytes you are paying for when a company is also paying Comcast for faster loading. When a website loads slower, the internet user usually gets angry and blames the website like "Oh my god netflix is being so slow right now" but what is really happening is that Comcast is slowing down the pathway from Netflix to your computer because Netflix isn't paying the fee. This gives an advantage to big companies that are able to pay these fees and disadvantages start-ups, which makes the internet less diverse and it also extremely effects our economy if these start-ups cannot grow. A lot of big companies like Facebook, however, are still not paying the fee because they were once a start-up and they don't want to disadvantage other new start-ups. The arguements that were being made were the FCC wanted this type of neutrality for all telecommunication services (phone companies, etc) but the internet providers argued that internet should be its own category seperate from other telecommunication services and should therefore not have to follow this neutrality idea. The court decided in favor of the internet service providers saying that providing internet or "broadband" is in its own category and does not have to follow the same regulations as common carrier communication services, making it legal for Comcast to slow down or speed up website loading as it pleases. The FCC said they might still appeal this which is why it is important for us to know about because we can spread awareness and push the FCC to appeal so that we can have open internet.