Daily Kos

Net Neutrality and Work: Howz that going to work?

Tue May 02, 2006 at 01:12:08 PM PDT

So, I was just sitting here thinking about what a stupid idea eliminating net neutrality would be for me as a private individual.  You know, thousands of religious websites to choose from, DailyKos on "sloth-speed", marketing majors in ecstasy, when it occured to me that my work life could be disrupted as well.  
My work depends on my ability to get to governmental as well as a lot of very small company websites to download information, software and documentation.  Are they all going to have to pay protection money to get into the fast lane?  
If so, that could prove to be very expensive for many corporations that will now have to pay the extra fees that these small vendors are going to be passing along to them.  The accumulation of those extra fees could be staggering.  Will I be forced to use close to dial-up speeds to download the huge tar.gz-ipped mega files that I do routinely now?  Will some of the small companies of a mere handful of employees dismantle their websites?  What about the government run sites like the NIH, for pubmed, brookhaven and BLAST? What about the National Weather Service and NOAA?  Is this the way Rick Santorum intends to weaken them so they can be killed later to make way for the Weather Channel?  Will we have to start paying fees to use them?  What about international companies?  How will their use of the internet be affected internally?  What if I have to use a server in another country?  Will the company I work for have to pay more to use the internet in the same routine way that it does today?  
Maybe someone already knows the answers to these and other perplexing questions.  Anybody gotta clue?  

Tags: research, work, corporations (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

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