Net neutrality: five questions after court struck down the rules

The principle of “net neutrality” was struck down by a federal appeals court on Jan. 14. Here’s an explanation of the issues involved.

3. Why did telecom and cable giants want the rules struck down?

Companies like Verizon and Comcast see this as an issue of free enterprise and commerce. For the most part, they build and maintain the Internet’s pipelines, and they constantly upgrade them as technology becomes faster and more sophisticated. So they want to experiment with different fee structures, based on supply and demand. They want to create a multitiered system in which certain kinds of services, such as movie streaming, would be “pay to play,” having higher fees.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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