Ted Cruz has taken a stand against a free and open internet, saying that it will only hurt consumers. Ted Cruz is wrong. If you think that you should be able to access any website without having to pay extra money, if you think that you should be able to watch movies online without having to pay an extra fee to your internet provider, if you like the internet the way it is now, then you should support Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality means that nobody who sits between you and the website you are going to can interfere with that. Comcast, Suddenlink, Cox, etc., can’t tell Netflix or Facebook that they have to pay extra because people want to access their site. It also means that little websites, like the GreenEggPage, which hardly anyone knows about, won’t disappear because we can’t afford to pay AT&T for access to their subscribers.
You see, you already pay for access to the internet. The websites that you are accessing already pay for access as well. What certain internet companies want to do is charge them more, because they can. It’s like the road construction company telling your grocery store that they’ll have to pay an extra “road access” fee for every car that comes into their lot. And if they don’t? We’ll just block off lanes so that there’s only one lane available to that store and people will go to the store that did pay the extra fee.
And don’t think that if Net Neutrality dies you won’t get burned. If Netflix (or Facebook or Amazon or whoever.com) has to pay extra, guess who will really end up footing that bill? Your Netflix subscription will go up. Prices on Amazon will go up. Employees of those companies will get paid less. Little sites will go offline. Sounds like it will really benefit the regular folks, like you and me!