Net Neutrality in Danger (AKA pay more money for internet)

[Lino Blythe 8]

I wanted to bring this up because America loves its money. I'm not one to usually take part in stuff like this but... This is kinda important to us all

I was wondering about how you guys feel about this and how the government loves its money

[Skye Prower 386]

I've been keeping half an eye on this. I have to say I hate the idea that they're scrapping net-neutrality, you just know that all the service providers will immediately try to force people to pay more to visit all the popular sites.

If that does happen, then only thing that might stop it (and this is reaching) are the larger companies like google or facebook insisting that their services are not affects. But more likely they'll just ask for a cut of the profits. And even if that did happen, it still leaves the small sites suffering.

Thankfully, so far over here, the signs are the EU wants to keep neutrality.

[Fwiss 29]

Ah, Net Neutrality. There are a lot of things I can say about this, but the main thing is that it harms those who aren't big companies. Common rhetoric would say that it hurts small business, but there are other important things on the Internet besides businesses. We are one of the groups that would be severely damaged by lack of net neutrality. SCANF and most other Sonic sites obviously couldn't pay.

Of course, the fandom wouldn't die so easily.

The most likely scenarios don't have the most obvious impact to the average user. It's possible that discrimination would not affect us because we serve relatively low-throughput content (compared to image, video, or software hosting sites).

More likely is that either the cloud hosting provider would pay for all sites it hosts to be prioritized. Possibly, that cost could be passed onto the person paying the hosting provider. People hosting sites out of their basement would be out of luck, though that is also becoming less common. That possibility is scary because it would centralize the network infrastructure -- only large web hosts would be able to pay for a fast lane, and naturally the smaller hosts would go out of business because of the insurmountable competition from larger hosts (think Amazon Web Services).

An even worse possibility is that hosting providers would not be able or allowed to blanket-pay for all websites they host -- this would lead to centralization on the web not only by host, but also by site. Instead of SCANF, Retro, and SAGE being hosted at the same provider, they would simply cease to exist. Sonic fans would move to reddit.com/r/sonic and similar. Choice of community would go out the window with site design diversity and competition, both for better and for worse.

Of course, privacy¹ would be further damaged. With discussion forcefully centralized, all kinds of abuses could happen: both the surveillance and censorship.

¹ A broad term which we might want to abolish in order to focus on the finer details of it. Perhaps split it up Fahrenheit-style into quality of information, time to think, and ability to act upon the first two.