[Below is the letter I sent to my representative, my senators, and the FCC. Well, I will send it to the FCC when their site stops being overloaded. It seems that John Oliver told the entire internet to Go FCC Yourself and they did. And then someone also spammed the site with purloined identities and anti-Net-Neutrality comments. So the FCC site is a little slow right now. But once it gets back on its feet, this baby is headed right there too.]
I want to voice my support for Net Neutrality. I am a software engineer in your district, and make my livelihood on the open internet.
I can appreciate the concerns of people opposed to Net Neutrality. I agree with them that efficient markets generally provide better outcomes than centralized control for most people. I can sympathize with the attraction of “zero rating” – letting people use some services without counting against their bandwidth. Ideally we should be able to continue to benefit from the phenomenal economic growth that the internet has provided.
Internet service is not an efficient market today. Until it is, we need Net Neutrality. I am fortunate to have 2 high-speed ISPs available to me, which makes me part of the only 10% of Americans with that choice. Markets don’t work when 90% of the consumers don’t have a choice. This Econ 101 principle is clear in an industry that is both highly profitable and consistently hated by their customers.
Net Neutrality also ensures that the internet can stay fertile ground for new businesses. If ISPs are allowed to provide incumbents with exclusive traffic, the cost to disrupt goes up. Would Google or Facebook have been able to grow if they had been crushed in their infancy by Alta Vista and MySpace? I want to ensure that the services I love 10 years from now are able to start today.
Net Neutrality is a key piece to the internet’s economic engine. Please keep the internet a Title II service.
[The John Oliver piece is below, I imagine the FCC is already aware of it so I chose not to include it.]
One response to “My Net Neutrality Letter”
[…] I've written about this before. Attacking net neutrality attacks both my values as well as my employment. The free market can't help when there's no competition. It's also really scummy that they're trying to use the Thanksgiving holiday as cover for this. Please don't let them hide. Call your reps. […]