Opponents of net neutrality being enforced often say that ISPs would likely not end up censoring or stopping the flow of any data, as people could simply switch to another ISP. However, as recent as last August, there was a bout with this very situation. AT&T blocked Apple's FaceTime from being used on their network. Now, this may not seem like a huge issue, but let's take a closer look at what was going on there:

AT&T was blocking the use of a product made by an entirely different company from being used by a consumer that purchased the product. AT&T generously said that they would allow people to use the product (software made by a different company on hardware made by that same different company) for no extra charge, under the condition that the consumer subscribes to a certain plan. This is like the milk man telling me that I can use my printer for free as long as I subscribe to a year of milk on his three gallon a week plan.

I personally see huge problems with AT&T doing this. It's "Company A" being able to block the use of a product from "Company B" simply because the data will be traveling through company A's lines. Let's take an even closer look while we're here. The product being blocked is, as mentioned earlier, Apple's FaceTime. For those not in the know, this can easily be seen as a competitive product to AT&T's phone services. If you have an iPhone and an unlimited data plan, you might no longer even need to purchase phone service from AT&T anymore. So there, we've hit the core of it. Given the chance, companies will most definitely censor competitors' products.

So now we know what the internet is, what net neutrality is, and what net neutrality requires, but what might be wrong with going against net neutrality? Why shouldn't a company be able to control what data is going through its lines?

The companies that own the lines, well, own the lines. They are the property of the companies, much like FedEx delivery trucks are the property of FedEx. At first glance it seems perfectly reasonable for a company to say that to have one's data transferred, one must pay a certain price. Upon a deeper look, however, it seems like a phone company saying it must approve what you say before it transfers that sound to the person on the other line, or a delivery company saying only certain things can be delivered in the good trucks.

This all leads the way to a few possible outcomes. The first is the bias against companies that cannot afford to pay an extra price to have their data delivered to your computer. If the only online store that can afford the premium price is one like Walmart, how can any other companies be able to compete with it?

Then more problems come up; what happens when an ISP decides to block a website solely based on the content of the website? It opens up the big ol' can of censorship. Google not ranking your ISP high enough in the results? Why not just block Google? Better yet, just block out the websites of any competitor. Eventually, it can get to a point where we have a small whitelist of approved websites that our ISP will deliver the data of.

Of course, this is all worst case scenario stuff, but, as the goal of a business is to make money, why wouldn't one want to block out competitors? If a company won't pay for premium delivery, why would an ISP, given the choice, ever give it to them? More on some recent worst case scenarios coming up.

We've established what the internet actually is now, the physical connection of computers across the world through modems, cables, ISPs, and servers. We've also established what net neutrality is, the idea that all data on the world wide web should be treated and transferred equally. However, what does this require?

The companies that provide the average consumer with access to the internet, ones like Comcast and AT&T, own the physical cables to which your modem connects. These companies charge consumers X price for access to these cables with Y speed (in amount of data per second), much like delivery companies companies such as FedEx will charge X amount to deliver a package in Y days. FedEx is charging you for access to their trucks, which connect to other FedEx stores and trucks, which connect to where you want the package to end up. Now, if FedEx were to say that only people sending certain things would be able to have the best service, that would be a violation of a hypothetical "package neutrality."

Net Neutrality follows the same idea as the hypothetical package neutrality. If an ISP decides that companies must pay a premium price to have their data transferred to your computer at the best rate, it violates net neutrality. This can lead to quite a few problems. More on these next.

So what is net neutrality anyways? To understand what it is, one needs a basic framework of how the internet works. There are two main parts to what most people think of when they hear the word "internet"; there's the physical network of computers and there's the World Wide Web. The physical network is actually pretty simple to understand. You start with your physical computer, the one you're using right now. That connects to a modem, which connects to your internet service provider's (ISP) lines. These are the same lines that can deliver phone and cable to your home. The ISP is connected to the physical web, which can direct information to any specific server you might want to connect to.

That's the physical internet, a connection from your computer, to your ISP, to other servers and back to your computer. But what about the websites we all visit, the actual web? The web is the software side of the online world, while the internet itself is the hardware, the cables and computers. The main thing to take away from the virtual Web is that it is the data being transferred through the physical servers, ISPs, cables, and modems to your computer.

So what is net neutrality then? Net neutrality is the idea that all of this data making up the world wide web should be treated and transferred equally by the ISPs. More on that in the next post.