One of the benefits (and hence the main purposes) of blogging is to attract opinions and thoughts. Thoughts from people who vary in philosophy, ideals, experience, skills and vision. And that is why a topic as contentious as Net Neutrality had to be blogged on Sastwingees. If you have not already, please read the original post along with the comments in its entirety, to gain perspective from the rest of this post.

NN is a concept very few people understand and even fewer who know what to do with it. Even the definitions of NN are not clear. It is a conflict between left and right, capitalism and socialism, government and private, free and controlled, consumers and providers, money and free. And yet, some of us happen to think there is no neutrality in other aspects of life, so why care about neutrality wrt Internet.

Based on my recent post on Net Neutrality, I have gathered two significant counter-themes. One view that says there is no neutrality elsewhere in life, so why sweat on neutrality for internet. Another view that suggests a Darwinian approach to how we adopt ourselves to how content is created/ delivered on internet. Neither of them is right or wrong, but just dangerously disruptive to the mostly “neutral” internet we have today.

Thanks to each and every one of you who read the post and the comments, and to those who wrote those comments.

Following is my own view on NN –

The move with play around with NN might be motivated by a combination of two reasons — (a) content providers are genuinely struggling to make money (b) they just created an innovative way of nickeling and diming.

Currently we live in an era of “cheap information” where everything is cheap or free. This is unsustainable. If they succeed in messing around with NN, we (the consumers) will all end up paying a premium to the service providers. But if they fail to do that (i.e. if NN wins), content providers will forced to implement more pay walls, steeper advertising costs etc…

Either way, the consumers are facing the end of the era of cheap/ free information. But the transition is about to be an ugly war, which we can witness over the next years.