A variant of this has been featured in the Kaleo which you can view here.
The principle behind net neutrality is that users have nonrestrictive access to websites, services, and content regardless of their ISP, platform they are on, etc... Net Neutrality is one of those things we take for granted. It was a huge thing roughly two years ago when Comcast (Terrible ISP, btw) had the internet hate machine on their tails because they throttled P2P connections. P2P stands for Peer to Peer, meaning that users obtain files from other users instead of from a server. Such uses of P2P are common in bit torrents and file distribution services such as what Blizzard does to send patches to their World of Warcraft players.
While some of those activities may be illegal (re: torrenting), some are perfectly fine, such as sending patches to WoW players. Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent traffic posed a problem, as it blocked or slowed down ALL BitTorrent traffic, and WoW players who had Comcast as their ISP were outraged. Without the ability to download patches, they couldn't play. And, well, I know what it's like when you couldn't play WoW. Anyways, while they were being shafted, everyone else reaped the benefits of torrenting. Rather, they reaped the benefits of having a non-restricted access to the internet.
I can see why ISP's would block the torrent protocols though. Take my university, for instance. Hundred's of students are connecting to the Internet in the dorms using a wired connection, and at times the Internet slows down significantly because of the amount of connections being made. Well into the night, the speed picks up because there are less students connecting. I understand well how a bit-torrent connection can completely slow the bandwidth to a crawl, since it is rather aggressive at downloading (It establishes multiple connections to download a single file). If only a few students were to torrent, it would slow down the connection significantly. Well, that's just my belief.
Anyways, the whole point I'm trying to make here is net neutrality is important if we want to have unrestricted access to our favorite sites. Imagine if we didn't have net neutrality. We'd be paying a premium just to access video streaming sites, blog sites, and social networking sites. ISP's are allowed free reign over what you can and cannot do. It could even get to the point where we literally can't criticize anything about our ISP or its partners. In fact, I recall a company a while back had a statement in their TOS where you couldn't criticize their company. I can't recall which company it was, though.
The reason I'm bringing up net neutrality is because of this article from the New York times called U.S. Court Curbs F.C.C. Authority on Web Traffic. Understandably, perhaps we don't want just the FCC regulating the internet. But we still need to be aware about net neutrality, lest we lose our privileges. As far as I know, we don't have an issue with net neutrality. But, unless it's regulated, then anything can happen. Imagine 20 years from now, your kids are paying more to access their social networking services than we do now? I would say that's counterproductive. Actually, what we should worry about is the decreasing amount of IP4 addresses we have. But that's another story.
One last thing to be aware of, is Google's Fiber optics service. I won't go into too much depth, but this is something I feel the community should be aware of, especially Hawaii since as far as I know, we do not have a fiber optics service. And it would be amazing if we did, because as it stands we already have our data traveling across thousands of miles just to reach servers in the mainland, which takes time. With fiber optics in our communities, the speed would decrease since our data is essentially traveling at the speed of light. Go and support your communities!
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