On October 19th, during the internet safety week at Stockton University, I attended a small group discussion and presentation with a few other freshman honors students. I heard of this discussion through friends within my honors seminar class, we wanted to attend an event together to get more involved around campus and take part in the overall theme of the week. We were expecting to be in a large group of people watching a presentation, but what we found were fellow students who wanted to share their research on Net Neutrality. The students told us at the beginning of the event that they hoped to open up a discussion of internet laws and guidelines that are going to shape the way we use technology as a whole in the future.

They first asked us about the topic of Net Neutrality and what it meant to us and as a whole. According to the information they provided us, Net Neutrality is the ability one company has over another to speed up, slow down, or block content. An example one of the students used was concerning Comcast and how they wanted to make a deal with Netflix. When the two companies did not agree, Comcast made the downloading speeds of shows on Netflix extremely slow. Once a deal was made, the speed of Comcast internet while using Netflix went from being the second slowest to the third fastest, with only two other companies downloading faster. We then discussed how these cable companies act as monopolies, buying and owning certain parts of land that they then sell to, not allowing other companies to steal their customers. Startups and other companies are overrun by these few giant companies that all have deals with each other to share resources such as satellites and cell towers.  Laws such as Net Neutrality hope to either counteract these monopolies or encourage them. We explored different benefits and downsides to each side of the law, but ultimately agreed as a group that these monopolies are in no way helping the actual consumer of the product. The customer is not only being given just two companies to choose from, they are also not receiving the customer support they deserve. The population of the United States pays more for the same amount or slower internet service than almost anyone else with an internet connection.

Having this small group discussion seemed intimidating at first, but having only a few people helped the conversation merge into more complicated and controversial opinions and topics. There was no exact layout for the presentation, as a group we were able to learn and discover our own opinions on the topic and ask any immediate questions we had without interrupting. I also learned many facts about America’s internet usage that I had not known before, such as America only being in 31st place for download speed in the world. This small and short presentation not only informed me about a worldly issue that will affect my everyday life, it helped introduce me into getting involved on campus and the many ways I can learn not only from my professors, but from my peers.