- What Would Our World Look Like Without Net Neutrality?
- What About Future Innovation?
- What Is the Answer?
- For More Information
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What About Future Innovation?
No one knows who will be the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Stories about businesses starting in garages and becoming billion-dollar enterprises are the stuff of American dreams and the envy of the world. Access to affordable, generally available, high-quality Internet service will be the catalyst for the innovations of the future.
The industry neither needs nor wants “help” from large corporations with a vested and parochial financial interest in the game—at least as those players propose it. The Internet has done just fine pretty much on its own so far. Since its inception, the Internet has always been driven by innovation and has more or less grown organically. Websites and services succeed or fail on their own merits.
While there are no guarantees of success, there are also no artificial impediments to success, either. Little guys have the same chance to be geniuses as the big guys do; however, the race is on to be the first because within a week there will be many copycats hoping to make it rich off of someone else’s original idea. All this can change, though, if the Internet becomes dominated by corporations fixed only on making a buck, because under such a scenario many small companies would not be able to afford the cost of entry.
Without Net Neutrality, decisions now made collectively by millions of users of all sizes will instead be made in corporate boardrooms. The choice we face now is whether we can choose the content and services we want, or whether the broadband barons will choose for us.