Philosophy 101 Unit 1

As I was thinking of what to write my post on I decided that I would write it on what has influenced my opinions.  Then I recall Dan’s lecture concerning the net neutrality issue as well as the telecommunications industry.  According to Wikipedia net neutrality is defined as:  a principle that is applied to residential broadband networks, and potentially to all networks. A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.  This definition basically states that all content on the internet should be regarded as equal.  Your YouTube video is read by the servers the same as an important e-mail from work.  The current way that this is done is being challenged by telecommunications companies because they feel that they are being “robbed” and that we (being the general public) is placing “unnecessary wear on their tubes”.

Personally I have to take a bold stance against the telecommunication companies.  They are trying to manipulate the policies on the internet to allow them to charge premiums for their services.  This system is upsetting to me as Dan continued to explain how other foreign countries, including South Korea and Japan have much faster and way more public of internet.  In South Korea one is even able to access the internet on the subway.  Telecom companies want to make the false claim that the internet belongs solely to them, while in fact it is more of a public good because it was created with our taxpayer money.

Net neutrality is still a large issue that is widely debated today.  In fact, as I opened up Mozilla Firefox to write this post, a new update had been added to my RSS feed on my yahoo homepage.  The post said that Obama has appointed a pair of net neutrality advocates and MMOG (massive multiplayer online game) fans to head his FCC transition team.  To quote the news source of the Escapist where I saw this information, “The pair are described by GigaOM as “seasoned Net Neutrality advocates,” and Werbach is also a World of Warcraft player.” It’s definitely too early to predict how having these unique type of gamer experience could have on policies recommended by Werbach and Crawford, but the fact that they have the actual experience to draw upon shows a significant change from previous administrations.  Videogames are the “new normal,” so it’s good to see that Obama is surrounding himself with people in relevant positions who have the background.  Lastly there is one random fact that I wanted to bring up is that Obama himself admits that the last videogame he played was Pong.  Hopefully by placing these knowledgeable people in his administration, Obama will be able to maintain net neutrality and maybe even help advance our internet access to that of the advanced countries like South Korea and Japan.