by S.R. Tomas

Created on: September 22, 2010

Recent governmental activity has stood to remind us that anytime a public domain is in danger of becoming privatized, red flags must certainly be drawn. The lucrative industry that has blossomed from corporate involvement and profiteering from war, notably with the U.S., is frightening to say the least, and leaves the door open dangerously wide for conflicts of interest that continue to cause disconcerting loss of life. The privatization of water, Earth's most abundant resource, has forced millions of people in places like Lagos and Nigeria into paying unfair, sometimes laughable prices for simple access to tap water (

Reason). Now, another public service may soon be subject to the historically fallible headship of public-to-private ownership and operation: The World Wide Web. Being a journalist, the topic stands paramount to me and my career.

It is of course an arguable concept as to whether or not the Internet can even be seen as a truly public service at all. It is provided and powered by private corporations like Verizon, and each of these corporations endow us this service for a profit and compete amongst one another for customers under the free market system. However, with the net being the most important tool for business and information worldwide outside of television, it can hardly be debated that complete, unbridled access to everything the web has to offer is essential for the sustenance of the public and its interests. A study conducted in December of 2008 showed that 40% of the U.S. population get their news from the Internet, as opposed to the 35% who get it through newspapers; television has gone down from 82% in 2002 to 70% in 2008 (People-Press). With journalism rapidly establishing the Internet as its primary, and, in the future, perhaps its sole medium, the NN bill would put objective journalism at an unsettling risk of becoming an obsolete concept.

The Net Neutrality ideal can be put into real-life analogy: Say, for example, you own a burger restaurant across the street from a McDonald's. Everyone driving down this particular road is exposed to your place of business and theirs, and they are given a choice, contingent on the quality and price of the product, as to which place they would like to spend money on. It's the very basis of free market competition. Now, say for instance McDonald's decides to increase its allure by paying the city to build a 75mph expressway that puts traffic through to the back of their store, opposite from

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>