INTRODUCTION
Net Neutrality the concept in which every data stream should be treated equally a challenge that the U.S is currently working on. It’s a very divided topic as many people oppose net neutrality witch most of them are big companies’ owners and executives as they have exclusivity deals and are the only option to some small towns it would ruin some of their business for them. Another big part of the population is in favor of it and most of the people don’t even know what net neutrality is, so they just automatically believe it’s a bad thing so in this blog were going to see how other states and countries handle this problem and possibly come with a possible outcome of it.
GROUP CONCEPT MAP CONNECTION
The most helpful source in the concept map for me was the one that talked about if the government needed to get involve and compared the U.S with other governments and what the people thought about it. It starts making a poll of what people thought about it and if whether they wanted it to be controlled by the government and the response didn’t vary in many countries as you may see in the graph most of the countries wanted it to be the government’s responsibility. It lets us see it from the perspective of other countries that haven’t controlled the issue.
GRAPH
So, now that we have seen what these smaller countries think about this it brings you to the question of what other developed countries think about this and how more developed are, compared with the U.S and what are these countries doing to fix it. Does the government control is the solution?
Example 1
Net neutrality is a challenge but yet the Brazilians have learned to manage it with an opened internet style “Brazil’s Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, enacted in 2014 and further refined in 2016, only allows internet service companies to prioritize certain types of traffic for technical reasons such as overloaded networking capacity or to allow network use by emergency services”.( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-other-countries-deal-net-neutrality-180967558/)
Tie in
You would ask yourself why this is happening why do Brazilians have a free opened internet its because government has taken control of most of the net neutrality and internet but “Many Brazilian consumer rights groups are particularly alarmed because the companies receiving this privileged treatment are all large foreign corporations, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and music-streaming service Deezer “with all these companies mostly being American. Also, there are proposals in the works that would grant tens of millions of dollars in publicly owned telecommunications infrastructure to private companies for free. Brazilian internet freedom is further at risk because the country’s telecommunications companies are planning to insist that its regulators align with the weakened U.S. rules. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-other-countries-deal-net-neutrality-180967558/)
Example 2
So how is this handled in Europe “The European Union approved strong rules in 2015, requiring companies that provide internet access to handle all traffic equally, leaving flexibility to restrict traffic when network equipment was operating at its maximum capacity. EU rules also allow traffic restrictions to protect network security and handle emergency situations.” In 2016, European Union electronic communications regulators detailed potential problems in agreements between telecommunications companies and content providers. And they explained that quality of service could vary, but no specific applications should be discriminated against. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-other-countries-deal-net-neutrality-180967558/
Tie in
It’s a whole different thing in Europe that gives them an advantage as of 2017, they highlighted the importance of Europe’s emphasis on proactively monitoring compliance with net neutrality rules, rather than waiting for violations to happen before reacting. This gives European residents much stronger consumer protection than exists in the U.S. and stops exclusivity deals and high paid services.
Example 3
So, what is Russia’s take on the situation, “despite a tightening of its already heavy online censorship, passed net neutrality laws in 2016. The recent legislation focuses on nondiscriminatory access to content—that is, the content not censored by the government, which is itself a sizable list. Russia’s regulation demonstrates more than most situations that net neutrality isn’t the whole issue. A neutral approach to data doesn’t mean any data is permissible, and a government can still choose to block access to large swaths of Internet sites if it can do so”. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/countries-around-the-world-tackled-net-neutrality-in-different-ways So is it really free and opened internet is the government taking control of it really the solution.
Tie in
As you could see the Net neutrality problem for them is almost inexistent but have other problems going on so when comparing to the U.S How does it handle net neutrality “Net neutrality protections might not be so necessary if the broadband market were more competitive. But 29 percent of Americans have no options for getting high-speed wired internet service at home. Another 47 percent have just one choice and 20 percent have just two”.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-other-countries-deal-net-neutrality-180967558/
The U.S is still working on an agreement for net neutrality but not as a top priority.
Conclusion
So is the U.S better off if Net Neutrality would be controlled by the government? I personally believe it would improve as it would be treated equally and there would be no exclusivity deals as its on Europe with a free opened internet but first, it wouldn’t be possible as the FCC would never give full control to the government to do such a thing and too many big companies are involved on it.
Reflect: I personally like the fact that you come up with three countries to show us how the net neutrality works there. Not only the fact that it works there but also the accessibility, how people can be using it because it is free.
Reflect: Based off of the countries that you mentioned and their approach to the treatment of data streams and exclusivity regarding that, I believe that the European Union has the best approach given that they are requiring companies to handle all internet traffic equally (unless under emergencies) as well as because they are proactively monitoring for any noncompliance. The European Union approach seemingly holds priority of their citizens over any corp or organization
Reflection: I would include the information about Europe’s own net neutrality issue, Article 13, a law passed by the EU that would filter the content of the internet.