The United States government allows its citizens a considerable amount of freedoms – especially when compared to some other countries. The government’s choosing to grant certain freedoms is not of it’s own accord (and now the current administration is made a valiant effort of stripping us of some of our most important freedoms – read habeas corpus), the government follows The Constitution. The absolute only problem with this document is that is was drafted in September of 1787 and a whole lot has changed since 1787 especially from a technological standpoint.

The government has been fairly good at keeping things fair and just in the world of technology – like breaking up the AT&T monopoly in the 70’s which, amongst other things, granted people the ability to purchase a phone – from whomever they wished – instead of renting it from AT&T (who “purchased” the phones from a subsidiary they owned). Until the last decade or so the government had kept up with what was truly right from a business sense for the consumer and what was ethical for businesses to do – which is interesting as we are supposed to have a free market economy, but that is neither here, nor there.

The first point of contention I have is the government even pondering the network neutrality issue. Currently in the United States there is full network neutrality meaning that no telecommunications provider has different rates for its internet customers based upon what services they use, or plan to use, or what websites they visit. However, for the past two years companies, on both sides of the issue, have spent mass amounts of money trying to sway Congress. The problem is, despite our equal competition laws, there our government has done nothing legislatively to ensure there is equal competition in regards to Internet providers. Basically, what this means is, if our government doesn’t do enact laws to ensure the internet stays as it is, eventually you’ll be charged more for say looking at YouTube.com all the time than looking at your providers web page. Another problem arises in network neutrality that there are no restrictions to what content one can look at, meaning if I have AT&T DSL I can freely go and browse Verizon’s FiOS service, at full speed and without any financial penalty. Without network neutrality the complete opposite would be true – my provider could squash my bandwidth down to say dial-up size when I go to their competitors and could even charge me more for looking at their site.

The second major issue at the moment on how our government handles technological advancements is cell phones. Instead of enforcing the same laws they do on landline operations which give the customer the powers to: leave a provider when they want to, choose what device they want to use et cetera, our government has passed, or not passed depending on the situation, laws the give the big four (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile) all of the power. We as customers have to tell and shovel out money for just about everything – if you want to leave your contract, 200 bucks, a few extra minutes, 20 bucks, and so forth. There is no freedom in the cell phone market. Most consumers don’t know or recognize just how much control the big four have over development of cell phone technology, or just how much they have stifled it. Every phone, save for the iPhone, has had to meat certain criteria (read: it’s how we want it or else) that there is no room for advancement.

The government should continue to make sure our freedoms in the technology world stay intact by supporting network neutrality and passing legislation that opens up the cell phone market.