On Monday September 15, a demonstration was held outside City Hall to demand the FCC preserve Net Neutrality, and also to not allow a corporate merger between Comcast and Time Warner.
The demonstration consisted of maybe 30 protesters, representatives from many organizations advocating for Net Neutrality, and Gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout with Lieutenant Gubernatorial candidate Tim Wu.
Net Neutrality is so important because without it a class system would be possible on the internet amongst content providers. With Net Neutrality ISP's are required to treat all content on the internet the same, regardless of who creates the site. More specifically, larger companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, etc would be virtually unaffected by a loss of Net Neutrality. The threat is faced by more independent sites.
With a loss of Net Neutrality ISP's would be allowed to charge content producers more money to have the fastest possible bandwidth to their site. Basically, consumers frequenting a lesser known blog might have to deal with a website that took forever to load as the author of the blog would not be able to pay for top-dollar speeds. Meanwhile, a site like Facebook or Google would have no problem paying an extra sum to ensure their consumers a properly loading web experience.
Imagine the difference between a 3G phone and a 4G phone. Now imagine website loading speeds are divided similarly with the 3G speed going to a common blogger and the 4G speed going to Facebook or Google.
Another parallel can express the loss of Net Neutrality even more efficiently. Since Facebook went public its algorithm has changed to favor those who can pay more for their content to reach more people. Those who can pay more can buy reach and can grow their fan pages accordingly. Those who cannot pay for this reach suffer a reduced audience as their posts will never reach as many people as possible regardless of how many "likes" the page has.
The demonstration also had a secondary theme. That of telling the FCC not to allow the corporate merger of Comcast and Time Warner.
Even with Comcast and Time Warner choices are limited and we are left with two mega-corporations who are forced to keep prices under control due to competition. Nevertheless, these "under control" prices likely could be better and the services provided by both companies likely could be better.
The FCC though is faced with the decision of whether or not to allow Comcast and Time Warner to merge, creating one monopoly to dominate both corporations' customers. A merger would end consumer choice and be a cash cow for the resulting corporation which could then charge whatever rates it wished and possibly to decrease the quality of services, while charging more for better services and more customer support.
Below is a link to a livestream archive of the demonstration.
http://www.ustream.tv/...