First and foremost, we need the protection Net Neutrality provides so that we all have equal opportunity on the internet and no one gets preferential treatment. The internet belongs to all of us, not to any particular entity or individual. Many of the companies who are fighting the concept of Net Neutrality owe their success to the fact that the internet was an open and equal medium when they were starting up thanks to net neutrality. Yet now they’re using the clout gained as a result of that success to prevent regulations that would ensure that everyone else is allowed to have an equal opportunity to succeed like they did.

And why should everyone else be denied this same opportunity? Why should society be denied the potential innovations that the internet tends to produce when everyone has an equal footing? My ISP is Comcast because, if I want a high-speed broadband connection, Comcast is the only choice available in my area. The reason they have no competition is because they were able to get the FCC to drop its original requirement that the broadband lines Comcast installed become part of the public domain and shared with any ISP that wanted to use them. This destroyed numerous fledgling ISP upstarts who had been waiting in the wings for the lines to open up for common use, and doomed broadband customers to paying very high prices for low quality service due to there being no competition in the market. Why do these hugely successful corporations get such preferential treatment at the expense of other companies and society in general? The only ones who benefit from this are Comcast and possibly the elected officials who they paid off in order to be able to stifle competition. And now, Comcast's blatant and deceptive blocking of peer-to-peer communications is exactly the problem millions of Americans have warned would occur without Net Neutrality protections.

The Internet is a vital engine for economic growth, civic participation and free speech. It has become the life blood of all different levels of people in this country. It is how we pay our bills, shop, run our businesses, communicate with friends and family, meet new people, keep up with politics, get our news and participate in discussing it, learn about anything and everything, get our college degrees, produce and expose fans to independent music, produce art, receive emergency information, watch and produce videos, etc., etc., etc. We simply can't allow corporate gatekeepers to smother these democratic communications and stifle innovation by (i) instituting a tiered internet where the truly fast connections are only available to those who can pay higher prices, (ii) discriminating against new technologies, and (iii) by secretly interfering with Internet traffic.

Simply said, you cannot place something as vital as the internet has become in the hands of private entities whose priorities must, by necessity, be their own bottom line, without regulations to protect the rest of us. The people have had a taste of something empowering and we're not giving it up without a fight. We feel just like our founding fathers must have felt once they had a taste of democracy.