Senate Denies Net Neutrality

The Senate just recently passed a Telecommunication Bill that is a great deal for the Telco’s (Telecommunication companies). Basically, it will allow the telco’s to pick and choose whom they will allow greater bandwidth to. For instance, AT&T would offer more speed to Internet services and marketers for the right price. If someone like Google for example, wanted to have their services delivered faster than Yahoo!, they would have to pay more than Yahoo! to AT&T.

To the Republican’s and the big telco’s, this seems to be a great idea because it would allow “healthy competition” and allow the end user the choice of whom they would use. It would deny a company from getting closer to the whole “monopoly” state that everyone would hate to see. It would be another system of classic free market economy that would benefit everyone. However, the only parties that would benefit this are the Telco’s and the politicians in their pockets.

To the rest of the free world, it means the end of the Internet as we know it. No longer will information be readily available, free, and able to be searched without any cost to the end user (aside from the ISP fees). Pretty soon, the big Internet companies (non-ISP) are going to have to make a choice. Either they will eat the added cost or they will pass it on to the end-users. I seriously doubt that any company would want to just eat the cost of added expense in the name of competition. Somehow they are going to pass it along to the people they depend on…you. “You lie!” you say? I hope so. But I doubt it. It’s just simple business.

Now, the fact that I believe that they will pass this cost on to you makes up the core of my hypothetical premise. Imagine, online advertisers want to set up banner ads with certain keywords targeted. Their site is ranked well on Google and “ok” on Yahoo!. They want to increase their spending on Yahoo! to increase their traffic on that search engine. Because Yahoo! has to pay more for bandwidth, the advertisers have to pay more to Yahoo! for the space they want. But if the advertisers don’t want to pay the extra money to ensure that their ad is displayed better on Yahoo!, they can go with Google. Google is cheaper, but their ads aren’t going to display as well on Yahoo!.

The fact that the advertisers have to pay more is also an indication that everyone else is going to have to pay more. I think that pretty soon, everyone will have to pay for higher bandwidth. The Telco’s will be able to tier their services (like some do today) to offer a “get what you pay for” model. Meaning, their lowest priced plan will offer the slowest bandwidth, while the highest priced will offer their highest bandwidth. “Well…no kidding!” you say. Yes, I say. Because the highest bandwidth you bought with your hard earned money, is the same bandwidth you were using for half the price before this Bill. Make sense? I hope so. Although this scenario is what I can see as being the “worst case”, I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope that we, being the end-users and marketers, don’t see a difference because the big Internet guys will “do no evil”.

But, after reading my humble blog of my thoughts and opinions on this issue, answer me this: In all things Internet related, where do the real “h4xz0rs” lie?