Net Neutrality is a little known issue to most Internet users, but it effects many. Most Internet users have no idea that their connection could be manipulated to block or slow traffic to specific sites. Reasons for this could be for shopping sites, political campaign pages, competing providers, religious sites, or sites with competing values to the network provider.
Currently this is a hot political issue with the government and is stirring up tension between political parties. Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol (and often dubbed a “father of the Internet”) has even been quoted, saying “Editing the Internet in the way this brief suggests is a gross violation of the First Amendment rights of the customers, because there is not much competitive choice of Internet access providers—the FCC is to be credited for their effort to preserve the rights of citizens.”
Many articles of research that I found on the Internet rallied around first amendment rights. In 2010 the FCC approved Net Neutrality, but still many were not happy, saying that the decision was too “mild”. The regulations banned content blocking and require network management, but only required discrimination to be “reasonable,”. They did excuse wireless broadband from all of the rules except the rules involving transparency and blocking.
As a consumer, I do not appreciate being told how to search the Internet or being told subconsciously not to shop at a certain site because it is slower than the rest. I, like many other consumers who have internet connections in their home, do not want to be penalized with slower internet strictly because of the programs on my computer or the sites that I visit. I believe that if you pay for a certain amount of service, that if what you should receive.