Net neutrality should be enforced by law

The battle over network neutrality — a battle that’s been waged in the technology world for years now — might be approaching its end.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission announced Oct. 7 that the regulator is pursuing President Barack Obama’s goal of codifying rules protecting the free flow of information on the Internet.

Net neutrality is the idea Internet service providers, or ISPs, should not be able to prioritize traffic based on their own judgment, such as blocking or slowing down sites deemed burdensome or unwanted.

Proponents of neutrality — including such large companies as Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com — argue that without official rules enshrining the concept, an ISP could reroute traffic from Web sites that compete with their services to their own sites. They envision a world in which customers would be unable to reach sites such as Hulu.com and YouTube, and instead be routed to an ISP’s own video-streaming sites.

The opponents of neutrality — which mostly include large cable and telecommunications firms — argue the rules could hinder their ability to best serve their customers. They argue that there’s value in prioritizing a site visited by millions over a site that’s viewed by a bare handful of people, and that they should be allowed to distribute bandwidth accordingly.

Moreover, customers who are unhappy with the service provided by an ISP simply can choose a new provider for their Internet access.

We believe the Internet thrives when it is given the freedom it needs, and net neutrality is the epitome of that freedom, and we applaud the FCC for finally attempting to put protections into the law.

There might be some benefit to getting on Amazon or Google a little faster, but it’s not worth the threat that one day we might wake up to suddenly discover that we can’t access our favorite sites.

ISPs should not forget that they do not own the Internet. They are the middlemen who are simply there to deliver it to their customers.

Frankly, we’re not even sure we trust ISPs to act in customers’ best interests. We’ve all heard — and experienced — enough horror stories that we all should be a little wary.

Really, it can be argued they already have too much power. Contracts with municipalities already mean customers have little to no choice if they prefer a cable connection to the Internet, meaning that choice of providers is little more than an illusion.

The ISPs might have been operating by the unspoken guidelines of net neutrality so far, but there’s nothing to say one day they might just change their mind. There’s just too much money to be made on the Internet, and it’s hard not to foresee a future in which ISPs pursue it with full vigor unless they are stopped.

The Internet is one of the most important of mankind’s creations. We can’t allow it to be crippled simply to allow a company to make a few more dollars.