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What is net neutrality?
Watch Prof Les Carr & Johanna Walker introduce the concept of net neutrality and explain what it is and what it's not and why it's contentious
In this video, Professor Les Carr introduce the concept of net neutrality by asking:
should the people who provide access to the internet be able to interfere in or to control, to some extent, what content we are allowed to see or what content we are allowed to create on the internet?
He also discusses how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can control internet traffic and mentions that some countries have recently introduced regulations for net neutrality.
Now watch Johanna Walker explain succinctly what net neutrality is not in this short 50 second video on our YouTube Channel (Johanna is one of our Web Science PhD students and is also a mentor on this course – we recorded this as part of our end of week video for an earlier run of this course).
Join the debate. In the following two steps, Les will outline the arguments for and against net neutrality.
Key players in the net neutrality debate:
- Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are those who put things in place for you to be able to access the web.
- Content providers are those who put the content in the web. Even you can be a content provider!
- Regulatory bodies are those who set and enforce the rules for all this to happen smoothly.
- The users, the people! They are those who pay and use the services and the content of the web.
Do you know if your ISP controls the data that you consume and provide through the Internet? And if so, how?
What are the regulations in your country around net neutrality?
This article is from the online course:
Web Science: How the Web Is Changing the World
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This article is from the free online
Web Science: How the Web Is Changing the World
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