Thursday, September 13, 2018

Imagine, for a moment, that Ford owned the road to your house.

When the automobile was becoming prominent, the government allowed private companies (like Ford) to build and own the city roads and highways, instead of building them with taxpayer money and keeping them as a public utility.

Fast-forward to now where all the roads used by the public are still built and owned by the car manufacturers; you pay a $2 fee to Ford to use the road each time you drive to and from your house.

You regularly visit Costco down the street to buy groceries, but Ford has decided to get into the grocery store business and has set up a new retail store next to Costco.

To prevent anti-competitive behavior, the government created rules requiring Ford to continue to charge you the same amount of money for use of the roads regardless of your destination when you drive on them.

These rules have been recently dropped and Ford can now charge you $2 to drive to the Ford grocery store, and $10 if you want to drive to Costco instead.

Ford = ISPs, Costco = Online Services like Netflix, and those rules that were dropped... were the Net Neutrality rules.

I thought of and have used this analogy for a while now to explain Net Neutrality to people who don't understand the internet.



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