Okay Geek Farm
Why normal people don't care if the internet is tiered
Brandon Davenport
“Can I still use Facebook and Youtube? Oh really?… their faster than other websites now? Great!! Let me send you some money to give me the internet.”
When you think about it, all of these desperate cries for action written by blogs, warning us about the crumbling state of net neutrality have been un-heard by “normal people”. When I say “normal people”, I’m talking about the people that don’t eat and sleep at their computers, or know the difference between a DROID X and DROID 2 — I’m talking about your Mom, Sister and friends that haven’t been blessed with the passion for computers and gadgets.
They have no clue what’s going on, and quite frankly, wouldn’t care if they did. All they really do online is Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and maybe search through Wikipedia if their feeling adventurous. If ISP’s were to announce a tiered internet, average consumers would go un-effected (in the short term). They would still be able to access everything they do now, plus their favorite sites “would be faster than everything else”, so if I were a regular consumer, I would eat that up like ice cream. I mean, its like saying “Highways have been re-worked so that the lanes you use most are faster than everything else” — its a no-brainer for consumers to switch over to a tiered system, even though it’s destroying everything the internet stands for.
Sadly, as geeks, we know the long term effects this will have on the internet. Innovation will be stifled by large companies that hog the bandwidth, and new websites will fail to become popular. This breaks everything the internet was made for, and as geeks we need to spread the word, and explain it in a way regular people can understand — or else 80% of the population isn’t going to do anything about it.
