Weekly Journal: Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality is a network design principle which states that all data packets should be treated equally regardless of their content, sites, and platforms (Wu, 2003, as cited in Easley et. al., 2018). This means that all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are required to provide the same level of data access and speed to all services and websites and they must not favor nor should block any of it (Kenton, 2019).
Currently, Net Neutrality is nowhere to be seen in the Philippines. Such thing is evident from the existence of both the two biggest telecoms locally, Smart and Globe. Both companies provide add-on bundles to their respective offerings like for example, if you are going to load your prepaid sim with a data subscription, this is often bundled with additional access to their preferred services like 1GB of data for Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and many more. Most of us thought that these are included out of generosity by ISPs but, we are wrong. These are paid by service companies like Google (who handles Youtube). By this, ISPs are influencing people to use these services instead of letting people use the internet as they want (Feria, 2018).
We, Filipino people, are not really accessing the internet as fully as we should. The lack of net neutrality here in the Philippines poses discrimination towards other entities. People should have their own rights on how they should manage their data allocation, not by bundling preferred services which is unfair. Furthermore, ISPs, in theory, can block access to the content they do not want people to see which can probably violate our freedom of expression.
References
Easley, R. F., Guo, H., & Kramer, J. (2018, March 23). From Net Neutrality to Data Neutrality: A Techno-Economic Framework and Research Agenda. Inforrmation Systems Research. doi:10.1287/isre.2017.0740
Feria, R. (2018, September 5). Net Neutrality Badly Needed in the Philippines — Manila Bulletin. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from Manila Bulletin: https://mb.com.ph/2018/09/05/net-neutrality-badly-needed-in-the-philippines/
Kenton, W. (2019, October 1). Net Neutrality Definition. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from Investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/net-neutrality.asp
