Look Familiar?

AOL and Friendster for free!

This image is merely speculation, but it is not difficult to imagine a future of packaged Internet subscriptions given that this is how television is already sold. However, a system of subscription for the internet would stifle the internet's freedom of information and interactivity, smother the future of legitimate journalism, and severely impact subscription services like Netflix, LexusNexus, and The New York Times, adding an additional ISP "subscription" on top of their own.

You may not even know it, but over the last few years your Internet subscription has already begun to tighten.  For example, recently in the US, Comcast has put into place a 250 Gigabyte (GB) per month "cap" on the bandwidth of its Internet subscribers.  Now, 250GB may sound like a reasonable ceiling for monthly usage, but this all depends on how you use your bandwidth.

Let's assume you love film and subscribe to the Netflix Instant Watch program, allowing you to stream movies and television shows to your PC.  Streaming Netflix in high definition uses approximately 2GB/hr, so if you watch an average of 10 2-hour films a month, you've already consumed 40GB of your 250GB limit.  Now let's assume you love video games.  The Steam service offered by Valve Software allows users to buy and download games directly from their servers.  The size of many of the games on Steam tend to fall around 10GB each.  Assuming you play 5 new games a month, you are eating 50GB of your 250GB limit.  Finally, let's assume you're very proud to gift these services to your nephews for Christmas in 2010.  If they use their services conservatively, they consume around 100GB of their family's 250GB cap.  Bandwidth caps are the Internet's equivalent of debit card overdraft fees, which were recently banned by the Federal Reserve, deceptively charging customers for unannounced and poorly outlined use violations.

However, despite all this, the greatest problem with Internet bandwidth caps is presented by the rapid growth of data.  Ten years ago, you likely would have had to Google "Terabyte" for any real scope of how much data a terabyte contained, but today, you might own a harddrive with a 3 or 4TB capacity.

Welcome

"[…] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

- Senator Ted Stevens

You're doing it right now.  Look at you go.  You're using The Internet as it was intended to be used.  A sprawling, free, open network of computers, the Internet has likely allowed you and millions of others to learn things in minutes that would have taken hours or even days just twenty years ago.  Chances are good you've already checked your Facebook today.  You can even use a computer or mobile device to interface via live video with another Internet user anywhere else on Earth for as long as you like.  The Internet has allowed for the exponential growth curve of technology to take off and we are right on the bleeding edge.  It is an undeniably fascinating time to live.  Whether you realize it or not, you are tapping the free information of the Internet this very moment, but, unfortunately, some Internet service providers and government bodies seek to stifle that freedom and availability of information allowed us by the Internet.

Net Neutrality is a priciple, a policy, and a movement.  Since early 2000, Internet users and researchers have identified the potential for the Internet to go the way of radio and television and suffer heavy regulation.  In the coming weeks, I will be expanding upon and examining the current state of Net Neutrality and the freedom of The Internet.