It’s not what I thought it to be.

Net neutrality: The Internet is quickly becoming a battleground between public and private interests. What are the most important features of this conflict?

I was my own experiment. I chose to analyze a day in the life of myself, to see how much time I actually spend on each of the three “W’s” (work, work, and work) in one day. The first “W”, which is attached to physical work – the pain-staking, child labour, trying-to-pay-for-University, kind of work – I spend approximately 8 hours a day on. The second, attached to mental work – also known as schoolwork, child labour, and trying-to-get-a-descent-grade-for-University – I spend roughly 4 hours on. The last “W”, emotional work, which includes crying because I’m so tired of doing physical and mental work, I spend the rest of my day on.
This is a break down of exactly what elements go into each of the “W” categories:
Physical work:

- Working at a Bakery: having to deal with rude and unhygienic customers from Brampton. I work approximately 8 hours a shift, four days a week.
- Working at a Hockey arena: Serving beer to hockey fanatics, who are too drunk to know that the Battalions are possibly the worst hockey team in the OHL. I work probably 4 hours a shift, two days a week – 2 hours of my shift are spent on my iTouch (Facebooking my friends who are having an awesome time at a party I couldn’t make).
Schoolwork:
- Mass Communications: I watch Ian do stuff on the Internet + do the homework he assigns
- Photography: I watch Kate do some stuff on the Internet + do the homework she assigns
- Introduction to Media Writing: I pay attention to Lara + do the homework she assigns
- Internet Survey and Research: I’m on the Internet + do the weekly internet conferences she assigns
- Geography: I don’t pay attention +… Do I even have homework for this class?
Emotional work:
- Crying because I’m tired
- Crying while watching TV shows on the Internet
- Crying because I’m laughing so hard from wall posts left by my friends on Facebook
- Drinking coffee
- Having an Advil to suppress my stress headaches
- Sleep

There is a point to this. This experiment shows that I am on the Internet practically… a lot of hours a week. The time I go on the Internet, even if it’s for one minute, I am acting in favour of Net neutrality – I want to access every website available on the Internet, and I don’t want any restrictions. As shown in the breakdown above, I use the Internet for a wide variety of topics, and to be able to browse these individual topics, I cannot have restrictions on what I can and cannot use on the Internet.
In his book “Free Culture,” Lawrence Lessig writes about Jesse Jordan, a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student, who was fined $15,000,000 by the RIAA for being a pirate (the kind that isn’t like Jack Sparrow) by creating a search engine similar to Google. “They claimed he operated a network and had therefore ‘willfully’ violated copyright laws” (Lessig, 50). Although Jordan was not being compensated for his search engine, the RIAA claimed that what he had created was breaking copyright laws, and he had to pay for the damage. Obviously, Jordan didn’t have $15 million, so the RIAA took his life savings of $12,000 instead.
It doesn’t make much sense; Jesse Jordan was running a free-of-charge website to help other students like himself, and was claimed to be breaking copyright laws. The Internet – which is only existent because websites are created and used – is no longer a helpful tool, which was its original intention. Now, because copyright laws play a major role in the Internet (and will continue to grow), the public has to be afraid of being pirates. We, the public, pay monthly fees toward our Internet access, but now it’s not enough. Even though Jordan paid for his Internet access, he was restricted to what he was able to do – a restriction that cost him everything he had.

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2005. Print.