The Issues Of Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is a principle that is made to protect individual free access to all content and applications equally, regardless of the source. In other words, internet Service Providers are bound to provide services to their customers by not restricting them from or limiting their access to what they access on the internet. When net neutrality concept in the services provided by ISPs is not present then the ISPs exercises total control on what to access and where to access, they have full control on our online activities like if a user access to a website then the ISPs will slow-down there access to that site and redirect users to a competing website. Companies that have higher access reliability with higher turnover always can effort to buy the ISPs to redirect ISP customers to their websites.

For example, the companies like Google and Facebook can pay to Internet Service Providers to provide faster access to their websites than to their competitors and as fact, everybody knows that in overall access to internet the Facebook access percentage is more than 45percent( approx. If this is the situation, then it’s the customers who has to pay the ISPs for online services (Net Neutrality, n.d, Para. 4-5). So, to avoid frequent destructions to access the internet, the internet rules are more framed in such a clear way that prevents Internet Service Providers from blocking and discriminating against websites and other online services.

On the other hand, the one other reason to make the system slow down is Piracy; nowadays its widespread and everyone are involved into data breaches and getting attracted to practice piracy. Many of the customers try downloading the latest released movies from illegal sites and then the processing speed will be slow down if that is recognized by the internet service providers and they warn us about our attempt of involving in piracy; still if the consumers do try to download the movies then the ISPs can proceed legally to take actions on such issues, and this is a common activity seen in our regular activities. There are also certain piracy protection schemes evolved to detect the piracy practices.

A new system called Six Strikes is alerting the content owners about the illegal downloading or uploading of copyrighted movies, music and television shows by consumers and notifying such issues to the participating ISPs about such activity detection (Saita, 2013, Para. 2). For instance: “The entertainment industry is teaming with five major Internet service providers to this week launch a new Copyright Alert System that will first warn online pirates and then start to strangle bandwidth of repeat offenders” (Saita, 2013, Para. 1). The throttling issues are identified better with top service providers; recently, “Federal officials sued AT&T, the nation’s second-largest cellular carrier, for allegedly deceiving millions of customers by selling them supposedly “unlimited” data plans that the company later “throttled” by slowing Internet speeds when customers surfed the Web too much” (Fung and Timberg, 2014, Para.1). the Federal Trade Commission(FTC) also stated that “the practice, used by AT&T since 2011, resulted in slower speeds for customers on at least 25 million occasions – in some cases cutting user Internet speeds by 90 percent, to the point where they resembled dial-up services of old. The 3.5 million affected customers experienced these slowdowns an average of 12 days each month, said the FTC, which received thousands of complaints about the practice” (Fung and Timberg, 2014, Para.2).

Moreover, we always have a problem in accessing to the data online there are situations which prompt us about the speed being reduced and we are being throttled; and in my opinion, there are certain precautionary procedures one need to follow to have quick access to the data online and to avoid broadband throttling.

1. Monitoring the data usage: generally the data providers will enforce this technology on consumers to stop clogging up the network because when many users start sharing the data network then the system processor will be loaded and results in a slow-down of the speed. To overcome the throttling problems one of the easiest way is to monitor the data usage, for this one must be very keen in observing how much data they are using and knowing how much the data plans provide exactly. In many of the cases, the data plan depends most on the location we are from and which ranges from 1 to 3GB, and so following this we can choose the data providers and monitor our data usage (Kimachia, 2013, Para.7).

2. Data Compression: “Data compression is quickly becoming the method of choice to reduce bandwidth usage and generally speed up the Internet. This method works by sending an optimized version of content across the network. The latest Chrome browsers for Android and iOS use data compression technology to reduce data usage and improve mobile web browsing” (Kimachia, 2013, Para.12).

Figure: routed Data Compression Process (Kimachia, 2013, Para.12).

Finally, we must be aware about the broadband throttling and should develop a strategy of identifying the advertisements and avoid unrelated data information from the storage box. The consumers using online services must be careful in choosing the Internet Service Providers and about involving into piracy activities as there activities are always monitored by the ISPs. In addition, the customers must also be keen about their data usage policies to avoid extra billing from the ISPs.

References:

1. Fung, B., and Timberg, C. (2014). The FTC is Suing AT&T for Throttling its Unlimited Data Customers. Retrieved from. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/28/the-ftc-is-suing-att-for-throttling-its-unlimited-data-customers/
2. Kimachia, K. (2013). Is Your Carrier Slowing Down Your Unlimited Data Connection? How To Avoid Data Throttling. Retrieved from. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/is-your-carrier-slowing-down-your-unlimited-data-connection-how-to-avoid-data-throttling/
3. Net Neutrality. (n.d). Retrieved from. http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality
4. Saita, A. (2013). ‘Six Strikes’ System Flags P2P Piracy and Throttles Broadband Connections. Retrieved from.https://threatpost.com/six-strikes-system-flags-p2p-piracy-and-throttles-broadband-connections-022513/77562