?$€ Economic Sense ?$€ The Latest Threat to the Internet
While Colgate students enjoyed their winter break, a federal appeals court
made a decision that threatens to change the Internet as we know it. However, this
issue has escaped student consciousness, which at present is fixated on Colgate’s
Artic temperatures. The ruling knocked down a regulation called net neutrality,
which holds that Internet companies (Verizon, Time Warner, etc.) must charge users
the same amount of money regardless of the amount of content they consume.
In a dystopian future that is quickly becoming reality, anyone who is a big
Netflix fan or likes to download games off his/her PlayStation over the internet
would be forced to pay exorbitant fees, much like cell phone users who get burned
for surfing the internet too much.
This ruling would have an even more significant impact on schools such as
Colgate that do not pay extra for what their students decide to watch or consume.
Costs incurred by Colgate, other universities and other businesses would, in turn,
be passed down onto consumers in the form of tuition, fees and costs.
Some of the worst potential offenders include Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T
and Comcast. For now, most of these Internet providers have committed to not
changing their prices and creating outlandish fees, but any student who has ever
paid a cable bill should have little faith in them.
For instance, Comcast already started penalizing users who use up too much
data by slowing down their download speeds. In other words, if you download too
many movies, or even large PDFs off Moodle, Comcast will reduce your Internet
connection to a crawl.
In addition to slowing down data users’ Internet connections, Comcast is also
bent on capping user downloads. For instance, one of Comcast’s more popular
Internet plans limits users to potentially as few as 12 HD movies per month.
Students ought to feel outraged by the thought of Internet service charges that
are more akin to a cell phone bill.
These bills are also not justified by service
costs either. According to Craig Moffet, an analyst at the Wall Street firm
Bernstein Research, cable companies such as Time Warner and Comcast
already earn nearly a 97 percent profit margin on their cable internet
business. It is also evident that our cable bills have been hard at
work as Comcast is preparing to build a $1.2 billion, 1,121-foot tower
in Philadelphia.
“Net neutrality” is not a sexy issue. And I would not bet that it is going to jump
to the forefront of student consciousness any time soon. However, students owe it
to themselves and their wallets to consider this issue when they head to the polls in
2014 and beyond.