Extra Credit: Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is an idea that all content on the internet should be equal. This means no discrimination towards certain sites or certain items on the internet. Having network neutrality means that no sites can be blocked, slowed down, or sped up more than the rest. As of right now the internet is set up where companies that pay more for their domain and their service have more benefits. This means the more powerful, better known, and wealthier companies all can get the benefits of speed. This means their pages will load faster, and the content will also load faster and in better quality. This is especially true if the content is an image or a video.
Many websites out right now have video on demand. Websites such as youtube.com allows users to pull up any video they wish, at any time, if that video is available on the site. This website is widely known and is constantly undergoing changes to make it better and more user friendly. One benefit of being such a big, widely known website is the money. With the money that youtube.com brings in from things like advertisements, they can afford better bandwidth. This means their videos load fast. This makes it harder for other lesser known sites to compete with YouTube.
There are many people and companies in the world that are for net neutrality, but there are also many against it. Large telephone and cable companies such as AT&T and Comcast do not like the idea of net neutrality, and they hope to get rid of it. They want this so they can not only tax any companies who want more bandwidth, but also so they can promote their own search engines by giving them the desired benefits for free.
The large companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get congress to rid the world of net neutrality. If they can get away with this, it will allow them, along with any large wealthy corporations who wish to pay for it, to have all the benefits of high speed. This would leave everyone else in the dust. If something like this does happen, it will put the future of the internet at risk.
Net neutrality has been around for a long time. It has been a part of the internet since the internet started years ago. The reason many are panicking about the network neutrality debate is because the large telecommunications companies have already mentioned their plans to destroy network neutrality. If the large corporations have their way with net neutrality it will affect the millions of everyday internet users, like myself.
Without net neutrality the smaller, weaker, poorer competition would die, and this would lead to only the large corporations being available. If this happens, the telecommunications companies can then raise the prices even more, making it impossible for the large companies out there to stay online. If all the websites online die, and leave only the telecommunications companies, they will have all the power and we wont have any say or any control. It is similar to Wal-Mart shutting down many smaller competitors until there are no more, then raising the prices. If what I said happens, and net neutrality is destroyed, it could be the end of the internet.