Twenty years ago, a typical night might involve coming home from work, checking your mail to see if anyone wrote you, maybe sharing a brief phone call with a relative, and then sitting down with a beer and a sandwich to watch reruns of Family Ties and maybe pondering reading a book. And, amazingly, if you did this basically for an entire week, without once calling every extended friend you ever had to keep them appraised of your every move, without once walking into a video store and shoplifting half their inventory, without once walking into a room full of people with varying political and social opinions and starting a huge verbal argument, you wouldn’t have batted an eye. In fact, if someone had asked you if you wanted to do any of those things, you might have had them committed.

And now, through sites like Facebook, the Pirate Bay and Reddit, they are everyday normalcy, some might say addiction. The greatest thing about the internet, undoubtedly, is the fact that you can do all of this easily and anonymously. Anybody can sign on and be a ghost in the ether, adding their little splotch of paint to the landscape we are all painting. This is not to say there is no consequence to doing so. Just ask Jessi Slaughter. Internet fame is a good thing only half of the time at best. But this is exactly why we all love it and spend so much time on it. Unlike the real world, there is the potential for just about anything you can imagine to happen. The internet is free.

So what is Net Neutrality? It’s a buzzword (okay, buzzwords) we’ve been hearing a lot of recently. It’s even gotten some high profile Congressional support, most notably from Al Franken, who has labeled it the most important issue of our time. I am someone who finds myself constantly worrying about the course of events regarding issues such as the environment, civil rights, immigration, the wars and the budget, and yet I honestly find it hard to disagree with him. In many ways, the decisions we make in the next few years regarding the freedom of the internet will have long, potentially disastrous results for how information is passed between people and how controlled that information is.

Before elaborating further, it’s important to understand what caused net neutrality to become an issue in the first place and what it means in the most immediate sense. And to understand that you have to understand how the internet works. Everything you view on the internet is stored on some physical piece of hardware somewhere. Those pieces of hardware have an IP address, which is more or less analogous to your house’s street address in the real world in that knowing that number allows you to go to that destination. So knowing that number on the internet allows your browser to visit that page. Because all this information is stored physically somewhere and the location is easily identifiable by it’s address, companies that control internet access like Comcast and Verizon can very quickly and easily know exactly what you are looking at just by seeing what addresses receive traffic, and they can know where those addresses are located. These companies don’t just give you access to the internet, they also give those locations their internet access to you. And they can turn it off any time they want, even if that IP doesn’t actually fall under their control, by simply blocking or screening it.

It would be like if you tried to drive from your house in FiOS commons to your friend’s house in Comcast Heights. The FiOS commons neighborhood watch group has decided they don’t want their residents driving to Comcast Heights. Now they have no control over Comcast Heights, but they do control the roads you drive on in FiOS commons, so they will simply close those roads. Now you can’t drive into Comcast Heights from FiOS commons.

The question then becomes why they would do this, and the answer is money. All of these providers don’t just take your money in exchange for average or sub-par connection speeds, they also make a lot more money off of services they offer to you over the internet. The easiest way to ensure that anyone using their connections also uses their services instead of other services is to simply block you from accessing them. So if Comcast has, for example, a new News service, they will “close the road” or at least “drop it to one lane” to get to other News services. This either removes your ability to get there altogether (they typically don’t do this because, in my opinion, that would be too obvious), or they will just subtly make your trip there a living hell so you give in and use their service, and they have basically been given a free pass to do this.

This should be a concern for everyone as it is a clear example of corporate interests overriding individual rights and in the real world; it would be illegal for a Comcast representative to stand outside of a Verizon store with football pads on and shove you around to keep you from going in.

The concern of net neutrality advocates is therefore what can and should be done to prevent corporations from manipulating your access to the internet. It can be hard to visualize, but the internet does not exist almost at all as parts of these ISPs. It exists in the aforementioned physical locations, a huge amount of those belonging to Google, and the ISPs almost exclusively provide the “roads” that connect them to you, but not the content. As an aside, if you remember the recent story about Verizon and Google making a secret back room deal, you can now see why neutrality advocates are even more jumpy. It’s bad enough that ISPs were slowing and detouring your roads, but now one of them might have a stranglehold on a huge percentage of the actual content on the internet, meaning if you don’t have Verizon, it’s theoretically possible that you will lose access to a large chunk of the internet…in a worst case doomsday scenario.

To try to sum up this erratic approach to explain the problem that is net neutrality, you basically have a thing called the internet which is probably the greatest invention of the post-industrial era with the potential to permanently and beneficially alter the way we trade and use information, and standing between us and that tool are companies who, through the pursuit of profit, are going to unavoidably act as a catalyst in that relationship. Neutrality advocates want to ensure that the outcome is not that a large number of people are cut off from information via a lack of available ISPs, climbing access costs, or otherwise content altered due to capitalistic influence. In short, a neutrality advocate simply wants to see anyone in the country be able to afford high speed, unfiltered and uncensored internet access. When you put it that way, it’s hard not to agree.

However, the reason the debate continues is because the proposed solutions are divisive. The easiest answer is for the government to step in and basically tell ISPs they are not allowed to limit access to things at all. The way they would enforce this is either through the creation of a new government agency or the creation of a new independent agency that exists outside the government and for the sole purpose of keeping the internet ‘neutral.’ It shouldn’t be surprising that the growing number of people who distrust the government hear this idea and ruffle their feathers. And in this instance, they probably have a point. While anyone who reads this blog knows I scoff at people who put greater trust in private corporations than they do in the government, the internet is one thing that will be better off without the government interfering either.

So what other solutions are there? The free marketers feel that customers will force the ISPs to play by the rules simply by choosing to take their business elsewhere if their ISP is being unfair. This ignores that most people don’t have a choice of ISP where they live and can’t just switch. It also ignores that knowing your ISP is treating you unfairly depends on having access to information that indicates as much, and if your information comes through your ISP, you’re not exactly going to have that information handed to you on a silver platter.

Al Franken is right. Net Neutrality is a very serious issue for us, and it cannot be ignored or given undue diligence. But it seems that there isn’t any answer that will please everybody, and so the debate is poised to continue for some time. While I hope that this debate can yield a better solution than the ones I presented above, I have my doubts about how effective any solution can be the longer we wait and the more ground the ISPs gain in their fight for freedom from regulations that would protect us from them. One thing is for sure: in another twenty years, we will be looking back to this time and talking about the choices we made and how the shaped the growth of the internet. I want that discussion to be a positive one.