{"id":3878,"date":"2017-02-12T22:24:55","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T06:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/?p=3878"},"modified":"2024-01-29T06:41:23","modified_gmt":"2024-01-29T14:41:23","slug":"how-talk-your-friends-net-neutrality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/how-talk-your-friends-net-neutrality\/","title":{"rendered":"How to talk to your non-tech friends about Net Neutrality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Net Neutrality is being discussed again, and it\u2019s important that your friends understand why this concept is crucial. Instead of explaining it in typical technical terms, it\u2019s usually better to draw parallels to if we hadn\u2019t had infrastructure neutrality in other fields. Roads are frequently mentioned; I find electricity to be a much better example to get the point across.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imagine if all your kitchen appliances only worked with one power company. The electricity they provided was somehow coded so that only their fridge, their freezer, their stove, and their washing machine could be used when their power is in your outlets.<\/p>\n

Imagine the cost of switching to a better power company. Cheaper, more reliable, less smug. You\u2019d have to replace all your home appliances. Every single one.<\/em> Pretty much like moving from the US to Europe or vice versa, to double or half the voltage in the power outlets. The cost of replacing everything, everything<\/em>, would be prohibitive. Therefore, the power company could pretty much charge you anything they wanted that was less<\/em> prohibitive than buying new appliances for your entire household.<\/p>\n

And of course, that power company would be the only company selling the appliances that are compatible with their particular power. Forget about choice. No Miele, no Samsung, not even any Ikea. Why would they care about choice? You need to use their power, anyway, so it\u2019s not like you can walk away from the table if you don\u2019t like it. They don\u2019t need to get a quality manufacturer in China, or India, or Vietnam. Some startup in Burma or Laos will do fine.<\/p>\n

This is infrastructure neutrality as applied to electricity. This is why we need infrastructure neutrality as applied to the Internet.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For once one power company has started doing this and gets away with it \u2013 a so-called \u201cvertical bundling\u201d that they claim is \u201cfree market practice\u201d, which basically tells their customers that their satisfaction is worth less than what you scrape off from the underside of your shoe \u2013 all the others will follow, if there\u2019s a small number of providers like there typically is with infrastructure. The customer lock-in effect is so enormous, the executives will be salivating<\/a> over how much they can overcharge.<\/p>\n

Now, compare this to your cable companies. We\u2019re so used to Game of Thrones just appearing on HBO, some other show just appearing on just another place, and another on some other, et cetera, that we don\u2019t reflect on it.<\/p>\n

But the scenario without electricity neutrality is not imaginary. It used to be exactly like that, with power companies requiring only their particular electrical equipment to be connected.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019re just used today to some industries getting away with this (entertainment) and some not (roads and electricity), and expect that today\u2019s particular situation is somehow natural. But this was not always so. In electricity\u2019s infancy, the described scenario with incompatible power companies was exactly how it was<\/em>, with different energy companies delivering different types of power that were utterly incompatible with each other. Most notably, this was a technology fight between Edison and Tesla (and Tesla\u2019s power solution won worldwide).<\/p>\n

This is why we need net neutrality<\/a>, this is why we need infrastructure<\/em> neutrality in every kind of infrastructure.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last but not least, don\u2019t forget John Oliver\u2019s take on net neutrality, who was (is) instead suggesting it should be called \u201cpreventing cable company fuckery\u201d to paint a more illustrative picture of it:<\/p>\n