Net neutrality

Recently, Google and Verizon have worked on a deal to be allowed to give higher-paying customers priority access to consumers. In other words, if a person pays a higher price for his or her website, that website will download faster to the viewer's computer. Here is a New York Times article about the Google and Verizon pay tiers negotiation itself. Al Franken, writing for CNN, called net neutrality the foremost First Amendment issue of our time, whereas Henry Blodget, writing for Business Insider, said that people should quit whining about net neutrality, that it is simply a business deal in which higher-paying customers get better service.

My point of view is closer to Franken's than Blodget's but I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, it does make sense for a business, such as an Internet service provider, to provide "premium" services to higher-paying customers. However, the commodity itself is as important as the delivery method, and the commodity on the Internet is information. (And here we come to the reason why this topic is appropriate for a library blog. A library's purpose is to provide the community with access to information, at no extra cost other than the cost of the community's taxes.) The Internet's original purpose was to share information, at no cost. With widespread use of the Internet has come publishing and intellectual property wars too numerous for one blog post (really numerous enough for a month's worth of blog posts or more) as publishing houses and other businesses were accustomed to charging for content that the Internet now provides at no cost.

Charging for content in and of itself is not wrong. However, a handful of companies being able to ensure that their content downloads faster for everyone at all times is not appropriate for a medium whose intention is to provide free access to information. My remaining questions about this deal are, will companies also be able to pay a higher premium to have their site appear first in a Google search? And exactly how much faster will the "premium" pages download as opposed to the "non-premium" pages? Some websites and social media services give the user an option of a paid subscription with no advertising and a free subscription with advertising. LiveJournal comes to mind; Yahoo's Geocities website builder did the same until it went defunct. However, a blogging/social media site or a personal website builder is a different entity from a small independent company selling a product online, which would automatically lose to a larger conglomerate selling the same product if that larger conglomerate is able to pay a premium to make sure its website downloads first. And what about corporations that report the news? Should a liberal source be able to pay a higher premium to make sure its news downloads faster than that of a conservative source, or vice versa?