By involving the tech community in the healthcare and debt war, Congress has gone too far.

Amidst heated debate over the Affordable Health Care Act, commonly known as "Obamacare," and in exchange for short-term funding to avoid a possible government shutdown, House Republicans have put together a proposal of demands, one of which includes a block on net neutrality.

What does the national debt and healthcare have to do with net neutrality? Your guess is as good as mine. But curtailing Internet freedom would have some negative implications.

Net neutrality is the concept that Internet data and access is kept accessible, or "neutral" and not subject to regulation and management by entities such as Internet service providers. In 2010, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established a set of guidelines over net neutrality that include:

Transparency over fixed and wireless networks. In other words, ISPs and carriers must make available the ways they manage their networks, disclose their terms of service, and provide consumers with the information they need to know about how their broadband service works.

No blocking of content, services, applications, and non-security compromised devices.

No discrimination against lawful network traffic.

These guidelines help to ensure protection not only for consumers and the Internet services to which we subscribe, but also ensure that smaller businesses such as tech startups have the same Internet access and data availability as large corporations. This helps level the business playing field at least as far as data packets and bandwidth.

Net neutrality sounds like a good thing in the name of keeping the Internet open and equally accessible for all Americans, right? Not to everyone. Earlier this month, the lawsuit Verizon filed against the FCC back in 2011 finally made it into the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C, challenging the net neutrality rules.

Verizon argues that the FCC's rules are "excessive", and an "arbitrary and capricious intrusion which violates the company's right to free speech." Because after all, as some would argue, corporations are people, too. Verizon, other ISPs, and Republicans claim that while they agree with the tenets of net neutrality, they don't believe the FCC has the right to regulate it.

Net neutrality seems to be a particularly prickly subject for Republican politicians. The current showdown on Capitol Hill is not the first time the GOP has tacked net neutrality onto a spending bill. In 2011, the House approved an amendment to a spending bill that would halt funding for the FCC's net neutrality guidelines. One Republican lawmaker stated at the time that the Internet "does not need to be regulated by an unelected group of federal bureaucrats."

Thus far, efforts in Congress to block the FCC's net neutrality rules have been unsuccessful. Those rules officially went into effect on Nov. 20, 2011.

As mentioned, there are negative implications if Verizon prevails, or congressional Republicans are successful. For example, with no regulation on Internet access and bandwidth, your ISP could charge you for the amount of video you stream from Netflix or Hulu.

Imagine there's a large company in your area and you share your local ISP's Internet pipe with that company. It's not a stretch to think that the ISP could get away with providing more of the Internet pipe and thus bandwidth, to the company because of some high-end expensive subscription plan that the company may have that is simply unaffordable for the average user. That means much slower speeds and access for those who can't afford high-end service plans. Of course, we have different levels of broadband subscriptions now for business class and residential services, but without some regulation that bandwidth inequality could widen.

Also, many net neutrality advocates argue that if providers charge additional fees for streaming services or for using more or faster bandwidth, it could disadvantage those who want to start a tech business because they cannot afford the extra fees. Ironically, anti-net neutrality proponents claim that such guidelines stifle the free market. Yet innovation in tech is currently not coming largely from huge companies like Microsoft and Apple—it's coming from the startups.

And of course, there's always the looming threat that without net neutrality, political and artistic expression via the Internet could be subject to censorship.

We enjoy a freedom with our Internet access and content that many around the world do not. So what does net neutrality have to do with our government's debt? Actually, nothing. But it's on the bargaining table as Republicans ponder holding our Internet freedom for ransom to try and fix issues that have nothing to do with the Web. That's unacceptable and everyone needs to pay attention.

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