Here is a definition of Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality: The principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites. Right now, and hopefully for the rest of time, companies are required to remain Net Neutral. So why am I writing about this today? Well, because most of the providers in Bellingham, definitely our biggest ones like Comcast and CenturyLink, do not believe in Net Neutrality. More progressive companies like Google do, but Google decided not to come here a long time ago. So why should we care? Well if Net Neutrality is removed, like we expect it will be under the new FCC director Ajit Pai and with the current congressional setup, companies can prioritize traffic. Think of it this way. Comcast owns MSNBC, without net neutrality, they can prioritize traffic to sites like sites they own too. SO I hope you like getting your news from MSNBC. I get my news from tytnetwork.com most of the time, who hasn't been too favorable to Comcast, so will they knock it down in priority? Without Net Neutrality this wouldn't even be illegal. They can also steal bandwidth from less expensive connections to make sure that more expensive connections get their full bandwidth. So think of it this way. A child on a low-income connection won't be as capable of doing their schoolwork so that a person that can afford a more expensive connection can stream the latest Stallone movie in HD. (Said Sarcastically) Because, Stallone is more important than education right? So low-income connections would become even more useless forcing people to basically have to either do without the internet, not really be able to use it at home during peak hours, etc. Giving a huge advantage to those who can afford better connections. Some may argue that schools and libraries may have better connections, but are we sure the schools can afford to staff their rooms after hours to provide access to these better connections? IF you've been keeping up with Betsy DeVos's commentary the answer is almost definitely not. Also, we want anyone to be able to educate themselves at any point in their lives, even on topics that the schools do not cover, also many libraries have the same connections you do at home, especially in the county, because better infrastructure simply does not exist. So, how does this relate to public fiber. Again, because it's the only real option to give everyone good access moving forward. Historically, the big companies never really do the right thing. Sure, we get token upgrades here and there but they never really do the job right. Furthermore, even though Comcast and Century Link are in Bellingham we only negotiate cable TV contracts with them. We do not say much of anything about their broadband services. This other regulation is handled at the state and federal levels. Simply put, they own the cables they are putting in, as terrible as most of their infrastructure is, and we can't really tell them what to do with it under current law. We also seem to lack the desire to do so. If we owned the infrastructure we could require companies to remain net neutral on our network. Also, most of the companies, or all of them, would be local. Comcast is based in Philadelphia, PA and Century Link in Monroe, Louisiana. Sure, it's a small piece of a much bigger picture, but at least we wouldn't be asking Century Link and Comcast to please consider not overcharging us and prioritizing sites and connections. We would have control, low-income connections would be great and we would have some actual competition. Plus we'd be future proofing our city and county and it's not even expensive to do. The truth is the time for when we should have started a publicly accessible Public Fiber Network started about 10 years ago, we just lack the political motivation to do what needs to be done, which is why I need your help getting more signatures and convincing our leaders to take it seriously. Knowledge is power, and we're on the cusp of many of us having even less access to information. Oh, and paying high prices fto have worse access. The sad thing is that all the big companies would need to do, like Google, is real infrastructure improvements but why would they if the contracts we have with them are toothless and there is no real competition? Here are some links if you'd like to learn more about Net Neutrality. Please let your congressmen and women know how you feel about it. They can still uphold it if they want to. And, please contune to support this idea so dealing with these kinds of problems can be a thing of the past, at least in Bellingham. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality