As a robotics engineer, listening to politicians or political pundits discuss anything related to technology can make me want to smack my head against a brick wall. Few elected officials in Washington have a background in STEM and they write poor science/technology legislation as a result of it. This is one of the reasons I decided to run for Congress against Mia Love in Utah’s 4th Congressional District.

The topic of Net Neutrality gets brought up from time to time, but it doesn’t stick around for long when debated in the media because it is a fairly boring topic. “Make Sure ISPs Can’t Discriminate Against Internet Traffic” doesn’t make for a great bumper sticker. Net Neutrality rules may not be sexy, but they are definitely important.

Believe it or not, the Internet actually isn’t magic; it’s just a web of computers connected to one another. This page you are reading right now is actually just a bunch of text files and images that are sitting on a computer somewhere and all of that information is being copied to your computer where you read it. Now, it’s true that the actual journey of the files can be very complicated — there are numerous middle men that will pass the files around before they get to you — but that is essentially what is going on.

The biggest middle man we directly deal with are Internet Service Providers or ISPs. This is the company that you pay to access the Internet (think Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon). These companies send a physical cable to your house and then act like a phone company by routing requests back and forth. Your computer might tell your ISP, “I want to see Thomas Taylor’s campaign website” and then your ISP connects to the computer where my website files are being stored and directs the data from my computer to yours.

Here’s the rub — because your ISP has so much control over what you see and do on the Internet, there is a fear they will abuse their monopoly power. How could they do this? Let’s pretend Comcast wanted to compete with YouTube and make their own service to share videos with people and so they launch ComcastVideo.com. Without regulations in place, Comcast could make YouTube run incredibly slow for all of its subscribers to encourage people to use ComcastVideo instead. Worse, they could actually block YouTube for their subscribers because they don’t want to compete with them.

They could also start prioritizing traffic and force users to pay up for a better connection to certain services. They could act like mafia goons and say, “That’s a pretty nice connection to Netflix you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. Maybe you should pay us an extra $5/month for a little...protection.” In fact, Comcast did something very similar to this recently. Consider the following nightmare scenario:

Net Neutrality says that all traffic over the Internet needs to be treated the same. You can’t prioritize one site over another and you can’t abuse your position as an Internet Service Provider. Ajit Pai, the new FCC Chairman and Internet Supervillain, announced that he is going to start rolling back regulations that enforce Net Neutrality. He uses buzz-phrases like “burdensome regulations,” but the fact is that he wants to increase the power of ISPs like Comcast to control how we use the Internet.

At it’s core, Net Neutrality is about freedom and ensuring that we have a completely open and competitive landscape on the Internet. One thing that has made the Internet so successful is that it is a level playing field. Any ragtag group of engineers can launch a website and actually compete. It drives innovation and allows information to be freely shared without discrimination or censorship. Net Neutrality is something that is worth fighting for and it is one of the reasons I am running for Congress. Please consider a donation to my campaign at www.tomforutah.com.