Holy Jeebus!

Net Neutrality in a Nutshell

redheadjessica:

Your power grid is neutral. You can plug in any standardized appliance to any standardized outlet in your home. No one else on the grid can pay more money than you to ensure that they get some “higher quality” power, or still get power when you have a blackout. The power company doesn’t charge you a tiered pricing structure where you can power your refrigerator and toaster for $10 per month, and add your dryer for $20 more, and then add in a range, foreman grill and curling iron for an additional $30 on top of that.

If your appliance fits in the standardized plug, you get the same power that everyone else does.

Your cable TV is not neutral. You pay one price for maybe 20 channels, and then tack on an extra $50, and you get $100 channels and a cable box. For another $40, you get “premium” channels. If your cable company doesn’t carry the channels you want, it’s just too bad. You can’t get them.

The large telecoms and cableco’s aims to gut the internet as we know it. As it stands, you plug in your standardized computer to your standarized outlet, and, assuming that you have service, you can get to any website on the net. The telecoms and cableco’s want to make it so that if you pay $10 a month, you get “basic internet”, maybe only getting to use the cableco’s search engine, and their email portal. For $20 more, they’ll let you get to Google, Twitter and MySpace. For $40 on top of that, you can get to Facebook, YouTube and Reddit. For $150 a month, you might be able to get to all the internet sites.

On top of that, the cableco’s and telecoms want to charge the provider, which could be Google, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc, to allow their websites to reach the cableco/telecom’s customers.

So, not only are you paying your ISP to use Google, but Google has to pay your ISP to use their pipes to get their information to you.

This is the simplest explanation that I can think of. Go read up on the subject and get involved. Please.

Source: From Reddit