Net Neutrality; Big Feet
by Danny McPhersonPassing through Denver International Airport the other day in continuing my ceaseless trudge to a meeting some place or another, I dropped by one of the shoe shine stands in hopes of prolonging the life of my favorite dress shoes. As directed, I took a seat next to a rather large fellow fumbling busily with his Crackberry (coincidentally, a word which found it’s way to CNN today!).
Not long after, the big fellow’s friend comes over, rambling about in a rather annoying manner. In an attempt to be clever, he began joking with the lady shining his buddy’s shoes, asking rhetorically, “So girl, he’s got some pretty big feet, eh? And you know what that means!”
Without so much as visually acknowledging the joker’s presence or even momentarily disrupting the chore at hand she near instantly replied, “Yes, big shoes.”
Surprised by her quick-witted response, the duo was stunned into silence – I had quite a laugh!
Her response seems intuitive enough, and equally applicable to the net neutrality debate – it’s all about perspective. Net neutrality is one of those things many folks could argue reasonably well either way, depending on their perspective (i.e. motivations), and finding articles, blogs and panels supporting various positions isn’t difficult – ask Google, who just so happens to be at the forefront of the debate with an opinion of it’s own. And so I’ll avoid introducing even more redundancy here (though I do have lots of opinions that could support either side of this debate, most of which aren’t new).
There are lots of far-reaching implications either way, from cost and access models to security implications of traffic [in]differentiation – all of which are largely dependent on perspective. If you haven’t formed your own opinions as of yet, I recommend you give it at least a cursory look - I suspect either way we’ll all be affected by this in the future.
