"What is the Internet and What Will It Become?"

Our discussion yesterday about net neutrality and the regulation of internet service providers to ensure that access to the internet remains open and relatively evenly distributed certainly shed light on some worrying potential possibilities. If net neutrality were to somehow become subject to deregulatory sentiment in the eyes of ill informed politicians, the power of internet service providers would be frightening. As we mentioned, the toll of ISP dominance on internet surfers would be quite high in that we would only be able to access certain websites and we would need to pay high fees to access more. What we didn’t discuss so much was the toll of ISP dominance on small companies, businesses, and individuals seeking to have websites of their own. While big companies would be able to afford to be included in ISP website bundles, smaller internet entities would unable to maintain their online presence for lack of visitors. Without the internet to level the playing field, giant companies would dominate their smaller counterparts. Moreover, much of the discussion and diversity of opinion available on the internet would cease to exist. This blog and others like it, for example, perhaps might not be able to exist in a world where ISP’s were completely unregulated and able to determine which sites are available to average users. The regulation of internet service providers to ensure net neutrality is certainly a pressing issue going forward. We can only hope that as of tomorrow morning, the future with regards to this issue will be bright…