Before I get to the topic of today’s post, let me say a big thanks to everyone out there in Mohawk land who participated in the library’s survey last week. We had more participants than last time we surveyed you and we’re looking forward to learning from your comments. Keep an eye on our website, we’ll announce prize winners as soon as we can.
The phrase net neutrality was new to me when I came across it last month and I suspect it might be new to you too. Once you know what it means, you’ll find that you probably already know the concept and perhaps even take it for granted like I did. Net neutrality refers to an Internet environment where all information moves freely regardless of content, sender, receiver, ISP or whether or not it is commercial (paid for) content. To understand more, check out this video of Amber McArthur interviewing University of Toronto Information Studies Professor Andrew.
Well, of course, you might say. That’s the way it is right? Well, mostly, yes, the Internet is still mostly neutral. If you ignore things like Telus blocking a telecommunications union’s communications during a strike. Or think about the censorship practiced by the Chinese government as another example. The reason this issue is on everyone’s radar in Canada and the U.S. right now is the belief that big ISPs and other corporations would love to prioritize the content that their customers pay for. In other words, that movie being streamed from Rogers to you that you paid for would move faster than your Google searches for health information for example or your free rss feeds. The people against this kind of prioritizing think it’s time for the government to step in and regulate net neutrality, to ensure that the Internet remains free and unprioritized, to keep basic principles of the Internet intact. Now it gets complicated, because the people who would like to be able to prioritize traffic argue that government regulation of the Internet goes against the same basic principles of the ‘Net that a lack of neutrality goes against! Whew! How do you decide who’s right? Should the government intervene or not? I’m not here to tell you what to think, just to provide grist for the mill – maybe a classroom debate? But if you did make me choose, I think I lean towards a law guaranteeing net neutrality. I’m not endorsing the Green Party, but their stance on this one makes sense to me:
The Green Party of Canada is committed to the original design principle of the internet – network neutrality: the idea that a maximally useful public information network treats all content, sites, and platforms equally, thus allowing the network to carry every form of information and support every kind of application. Green Party MPs will pass legislation granting the Internet in Canada the status of Common Carrier – prohibiting Internet Service Providers from discriminating due to content while freeing them from liability for content transmitted through their systems.
For more information, Go to the BRAIN & search the magazine and journal database called Academic Search Premiere (search on “net neutrality”). Or you can just Google “net neutrality Canada” or see any of the following sites and articles that were useful to me for this post:
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