Week 3 thing 7

So this thing was to do a blog about something techie. That should be that hard I'm the tech trainer right. You have no idea how hard it can be to pick a topic when it's that broad. Anyway on to the techie blog post for this thing...

So today the FTC came down officially against the need for net neutrality. I didn't think they would do any different but still I'm disappointed. In case you don't know the debate net neutrality is about making ISPs treat all data net over the Internet the same. What the FTC said was it didn't see a need to make a law mandating that which while not saying it is ok it also doesn't say it's not ok. Talk about fence sitting. The reason I think this is so important is because without a law there is nothing stopping your ISP from blocking certain content from you because it takes up more bandwidth or maybe they block the web site of a competitor. That's not that hard to do from the technological end of things. It's actually rather simplistic. The ability to block web sites is built into every router. The counter argument to this is her if an ISP does something like this and their customers don't like it then the customers can go someplace else. That's the basic principle of a free market. The problem with this is the might only be one high speed ISP in a given area. Sure you have an alternative to go back to dial up but that's not even close to the same thing. Broadband access has become just as important or even more important to some people then phone. I'd have to say if I had to chose between turning off my high speed or turning off my phone I'll turn off my phone. I can always talk over the Internet either with voice chat or email. I can't get my Internet through my phone at the same speed.

So there's my techie post about some topic. Bad FTC. You had a chance to make a stand and you didn't take it. Let's hope this doesn't come back to bite everyone in the future.