4.+Our+Position

We believe net neutrality to be a fundamental property of the internet's identity.

It is that the issue has two very debatable sides. On the one had, without net-neutrality regulations, the technological progress of the internet will be sped up. That is why one of the founding fathers of the internet, 'Transmission Control Protocol' inventor Bob Khan opposes it. He, and other engineers like him still remember the ARPANET roots of the internet, and possibly see it through that framework: a piece of technological marvel; a completely new field of science that revolutionizes human interaction. On the other hand however, the internet is more than its technological makeup, it functions at a level of abstraction higher than that. The internet is a medium for knowledge and creativity. While, technological advancement increases it's power and is thus welcome; it is never the less paramount that it comes second as an issue of concern. The primary issue should be preserving the internet's current identity. What good is having instant access to FOX.com streams, if FOX and friends are the only sources of information? Internet service providers should not get to discriminate between content. It is the user alone who can say what value each piece of data has to him personally.

We live in a world where the entirety of human knowledge is one 'google' away; the freedom of information we are experiencing is unprecedented. A ban on net-neutrality would effectively take away that freedom of information. It would take away one of the defining concepts of our era; of the network society. And it would do it simply because companies wanted to increase profits. We need to recognize that the individual has less and less say in what happens in the world. That institutions are the new citizens and that their goals differ from ours. We must not let the world change to accommodate these institutions at the expense of its actual population.