1. What is network neutrality? Why has the Internet operated under net neutrality up to this point in time?
2. Who’s in favor of net neutrality? Who’s opposed? Why?
3. What would be the impact on individual users, businesses, and government if Internet providers switched to a tiered service model?
4. Are you in favor of legislation enforcing network neutrality? Why or why not?

What kind of Internet user are you? Do you primarily use the Net to do a little e- mail and look up phone numbers? Or are you online all day, watching YouTube videos, downloading music files, or playing online games? If you have a smartphone, do you use it to make calls and check the Web every so often, or do you stream TV shows and movies on a regular basis? If you’re a power Internet or smartphone user, you are consuming a great deal of bandwidth, and hundreds of millions of people like you might start to slow the Internet down. YouTube consumed as much bandwidth in 2007 as the entire Internet did in 2000, and AT& T’s mobile network will carry more data in the first two months of 2015 than in all of 2010. If user demand for the Internet overwhelms network capacity, the Internet might not come to a screeching halt, but users would be faced with very sluggish download speeds and slow performance of Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, and other data- heavy services. Heavy use of iPhones in urban areas such as New York and San Francisco has already degraded service on the AT& T wireless network. AT& T reports that 3 percent of its subscriber base accounts for 40 percent of its data traffic.