The Net Neutrality Debate Is Coming To Amarillo Later This Week
On Thursday, July 19th, you are being asked to give up your lunch hour to make a stand to save Net Neutrality. The organizer of the event is a group called Fight for the Future.
According to the event page on Facebook and the post on the Amarillo subreddit, the event will be held at Representative Mac Thornberry’s office at 620 South Taylor Street. A rally is being held and a letter will be delivered to Rep. Thornberry’s office.
The issue of Net Neutrality is a muddled one. It has been clouded by political grandstanding on both sides of the issue. On one hand, there is the pro free market crowd that sees ending Net Neutrality as a way to encourage competition in the telecom sector. Hopefully this competition brings about better service and lower prices for consumers. It will also remove restricting regulations on the companies responsible for bringing us access to the world wide web.
Supporters of Net Neutrality claim that ending Net Neutrality makes room for monopolies to create fast lanes that we will all be required to pay a premium price for. According to them, if you can’t pay that premium, then you will lose access to your favorite websites or even worse, to the internet as a whole. They claim that there will be no need to create better infrastructure or lower prices as monopolies will rule the market. They want to continue regulating the Net as a utility.
This is of course a very shallow, stripped down version of the arguments.
For more information on the rally, check out this website. You can also check out the Facebook event page here.
I will be stopping by the rally on Thursday to see what, if any, kind of turn out the organizers are able to drum up.