Jesse Willms: Unethical Companies Threatening Net Neutrality

On this blog I’ve spent a wealth of time talking about the ethics of doing business over the Internet. I believe that being open and honest with your customers is the best way to do business. And, I believe doing so will generate profits ethically in the long term as long as we are all playing on a level playing field.

Some larger companies, it seems, don’t agree with me and would  like the odds completely stacked in their favor, even if it ends up giving consumers less choice and damaging small and mid sized companies.

For over a year now they’ve been pressuring the FCC to eliminate net neutrality. Net neutrality is the concept that right now you can access any site on the web you want to no matter who your Internet service provider is and all sites load up at the same rate of speed. That’s good for consumers and business owners alike.

But, many Internet service providers want to kill net neutrality. They want to be able to block any site they want from their customers and they want the ability to ensure that some sites load more quickly than others.

Why do they want this? The answer is money. If net neutrality goes away then large companies can pay them to make sure that their competitors sites are either completely blocked or load so slowly as to be useless.

It could also be an advantage to the ISPs themselves. Imagine if an Internet service provider created a map application site to compete with Google Maps. Now, imagine if they charged money for their site, while Google remains free of charge. Wouldn’t it be in that ISPs best interest to block Google maps from their customers? You bet it would. But it wouldn’t be the ethical thing to do and it would not be good for regular people.

This week some members of the FCC have proposed a compromise measure where net neutrality will continue for fixed based computers – the ones you use at work and home – but be eliminated for mobile devices.

That’s a bad deal – because more and more people are doing their web searching from their mobile devices. In fact as tablets like the Apple iPad become more popular it’s possible to see a time when nearly all web surfing will be done over mobile devices.In other words, this is not a fair or ethical compromise at all. It’s simply an attempt for big companies to make more money off the Internet while giving consumers fewer choices.

That, in my opinion, is indefensible.