 So today is July 12th, 2017, and we're going to talk real quick about net neutrality as it's a day of net neutrality. So we'll start with a question. Does your inner provider, whoever that might be, Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon, do the people in power there share your values, share your political beliefs, share your view of the world? And you're probably asking, why does that matter at all? It absolutely shouldn't. And normally it doesn't. But that's why we have net neutrality. So net neutrality is a really simple concept, but it's a very complicated issue. The concept is, just like freedom of speech, the First Amendment protects us to say whatever things we want, good, bad, stupid, smart, whatever we can say them. Net neutrality is the concept that the packets, as in the bits that we pass to open up different websites, we can do whatever we want. I can go to YouTube, I can go to Google, I can go to whatever website I want to go to. I can go to my website. And it's unadulterated. It is completely transparent, as in I can get to wherever I want, however I want to get there through my internet provider. And they can't manipulate my search results. They can't manipulate how fast the traffic goes. How any of that comes to me. They can't block websites. They can't block different political views because that they lean it. And that's why the question, do they share the values, is so important. Now, what net neutrality is, is say, leave things the way they are. Now, the other argument I've heard is we don't need net neutrality because all these companies have been behaving. They haven't. If you watch the news at all, and we'll just pull up one quick article right here, Comcast has been caught, and this goes back even to 2007, manipulating traffic and changing things, changing the way the internet works to the way they want it to work. And this has been happening with things like Netflix and all these streaming services popping up. Comcast realizes they may be losing subscribers. So they simply block it. That would force you to use their network more because, hey, use our Comcast on-demand service and stay inside of our network. Don't go to those Netflix guys, and there's stifling competition. Now, only under a free market argument, you would say, well, I'll just switch to the competitor. Well, we have that statistic too. This is the statistics provided by the FCC, which is broadband access in America. And it's in a really sad state of affairs. That is an entirely another discussion why there's a lack of competition. And it's due to a lot of bad governance. More than anything else. There's a lot of these companies to end up creating essentially monopolies. And in short, what this says is the majority of America only has access to a single provider. And that's what breaks the free market concept. If there were multiple riders and one provider decided that we're not going to participate in net neutrality, we're going to manipulate things to get you to do the internet the way we want it to provide to you, you can't just go, well, I'm going to switch to another company. Not an option for most people. We're lucky here where I'm at in the greater Detroit area that we have a couple of internet providers. But a lot of states do not. And we do have even some cities down here that we've had problems with for our clients because they have a poor internet provider in their area and they only have the one. So you have to deal with, as it's handed to you, their internet provisioning. So until we get more competition, even if we get competition, I still think it's a good idea, but until we get more competition, we need net neutrality more than ever. We can't let these ISPs that have essentially locked in areas being able to manipulate the packets. We should be able to go to what websites we want when we want. Now, I think they should only be doing what they have. This is not the government destroying their business model. They're internet service providers. They connect me to the internet. I pay them for that. They are not internet service manipulators. They should not be manipulating my internet in the way that they see fit. They argument that it's their network and they can do whatever they want. It just doesn't hold water when you factor in that once they start being able to do whatever they want, they will, they have been trying. And there's no competition for this. And it's no easy way due to lots of more government or poor governance to start an ISP or create more competition or market. So that's why net neutrality is important. It's important to the way the internet works. It's an alga to the free speech that we have outside the internet. And it actually gives us access to speech on there because the internet providers, if they're able to block websites based on their political views as in the people in power at Comcast, if they go, you know what, we're blocking everything on the left or we're blocking everything right. If they don't hold your values, they're going to share something differently or they're going to manipulate the internet to be different to mold it to their views. And because the internet is so important to us here in 2017, and of course, I see it only getting more important as a critical part of our infrastructure, we really don't want them to be manipulating any of that data. So I ask that you support net neutrality. If you have an argument more compelling than mine of why I'm wrong, I'm always interested in that because there's always someone who says, no, no, it's just big government interference, not for government interference. But I do live in a world where we have rules and we have things like freedom of speech. This is kind of a digital version of freedom of speech. The internet's working like this now, which should continue to work like this. ISPs are making money and it works. The system's not broken. They would love to break it because it's a cash grab because once you have a monopoly and you can manipulate, they can charge you what they want for it. So I ask that you support net neutrality. I hope this video was a little bit informative and cleared up a couple things on there. I'll probably be sharing this and posting this with a few other people because I imagine there'll be many debates today about this topic and a lot of people sometimes have a lot of bad information related to it. So it's not really, it's no more government interference than the First Amendment interferes with your ability to say things. It's actually a protection for you to say things, not a interference with the way that these companies do business. So as always, thanks for watching, like and subscribe, and leave comments below.