Net Neutrality

The following is a comment I decided to file with the FCC.  Who knows what good it will do, but at least I felt like I was doing something.  I'm not sure I fully understand the nuances and intricacies of the net neutrality issue, but I feel confident that the issue is important enough to warrant proactivity, even from those of us who find ourselves perplexed by its complexities.

To Whom it May Concern:

I second the thoughts of such other commenters as Rob Vasko and Tarrence Van As, that internet telecommunications companies should be reclassified as common carriers. Nearly every major industry and social infrastructure, not to mention a large percentage of United State's citizens, rely on the internet daily for everything from news and entertainment to education and innovation. If ISPs are granted the ability to choose who gets access to whose content, those ISPs' interests will always win out, and that will create an unbalanced, unfair, and undemocratic system.

While some corners of the internet may seem to be luxuries rather than necessities, and still others are even illegal, the decision regarding who should or should not be allowed to either produce or consume those areas of the internet does not belong with ISPs. ISPs are private companies with little to no fair and public oversight or regulation, unlike law enforcement or government, and as such, their decisions are far less likely to be in the public's best interest. Their job is and always has been to provide the means by which information producers and maintainers--YouTube, Wikipedia, Netflix, and Joe the Blogger--get their messages out to information consumers. Their job should not be to decide which information producers deserve to be heard and which information consumers deserve to hear them.

The internet at its best is the most democratic system this country and even this world has ever seen. If net neutrality were to die off, that democracy may not necessarily come to a screeching halt, but it will never be as attainable as it once was. And with something so important as the universal right to information, there should be no higher motivation than freedom and democracy.

Thank you,
Mary Margaret Healy

If you, too, would like to make a public comment to the FCC, you can do so here.