Let’s discuss why net neutrality and its protections are necessary in the modern age.

Net Neutrality: All Internet Traffic is Treated Equally

As a philosophy, net neutrality is based on the principle that—regardless of who is trying to access a website or what website is attempting to share content—the Internet service provider, or ISP, provides the same level of service across the board.

In other words, net neutrality blocks ISPs from prioritizing certain websites that pay them extra to speed up their delivery or from throttling those with conflicting business interests to their own. With net neutrality in place, businesses can’t “invest” in an Internet service provider in exchange for their website loading faster than those belonging to their competitors. If a particular ISP had ties to a streaming service, net neutrality would prevent this provider from slowing down all others or unfairly boosting the one whose success the ISP’s parent company was interested in promoting.

On the other side of the equation, ISPs would also be barred from limiting users based on where they live, who they vote for, how much they make, or their race while ensuring their services are reliable, secure, and affordable.

In 2015, the United States Federal Communications Commission established a rule ensuring net neutrality. In other words, Internet service providers were not allowed to vary traffic speeds based on the websites users visited, barring websites from paying ISPs to deliver their content faster. These rules were repealed barely two years later, but a vote on April 25th of this year will hopefully put these protections back in place.

So, why do we say hopefully? After all, we operate as a business… wouldn’t we find it beneficial to pay our local ISP to incentivize anyone looking for business IT services to spend more time on our website?

There are a few reasons why this isn’t the case.

Net Neutrality’s Protections Prevent a Lot More Than You’d Think

Because it is based on equity across the Internet, net neutrality disallows ISPs from unfairly leveraging their role and position to take advantage of the parties on either side of the Internet connection: the user and the content provider. For our purposes, these parties represent your business’ audience and your business’ website, respectively.

Without net neutrality, an ISP could charge the user and content provider for certain types of content in addition to the service charge that simply using the ISP incurs or slow traffic unless the content provider pays an additional charge. The ISPs have argued that their network resources aren’t used equally without these changes. With a lot of content coming from outside their network, ISPs also claim it is unfair that they must absorb the cost of traffic to this content without themselves benefitting from it.

However, it must be noted that an ISP’s services effectively give users a set amount of resources to use as they wish. The user can use that amount and no more… and if the user doesn’t use all of it, there are no refunds.

It must also be said that many ISPs themselves provide content. While the arguments against net neutrality claim that this would result in discounts for users paying more attention to ISP-tied entertainment, supporters of net neutrality counter this by pointing out that most places in the United States only have one viable choice of ISP serving them. Net neutrality would prevent ISPs from throttling other entertainment providers and help eliminate the formation of more abusive monopolies overall.

Finally, we must address the fact that smaller businesses already have a hard enough time competing with huge corporations. Net neutrality protects these companies from massive competitors simply flooding ISPs with money to prioritize their online presence and box small businesses out of opportunities. 

The Internet is Too Vital to Sacrifice Its Openness

If you believe that net neutrality is essential, we recommend that you visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s page detailing the fight in greater depth than we have here. The EFF has also provided instructions to help you comment on the proceeding for yourself—going so far as to provide a boilerplate comment that you could (and we recommend that you do) use.

If you’re ready to place a comment now, visit the FCC’s comment page and specify proceeding “23-230” before leaving your thoughts in the provided field or using the boilerplate provided by the EFF. 

Please do so today, as the vote takes place the day after this was published (April 25th, 2024).

100-80-100

Four-day workweek advocates talk of the 100-80-100 theory. This theory states that employees get 100 percent of their work done in 80 percent of the time while earning 100 percent of their pay. Advocates say that this can be done pretty simply by cutting the number of meetings that an employee has to attend and more conscientiously using technology to get people the resources they need to be extra productive, allowing for what is viewed in many circles as an aggressive scheduling policy.

The basis behind the four-day change is that studies show that people get burnt out when they don’t get a chance to enjoy their lives outside of work. Business often affects people’s mental and physical health and can cause organizational problems. To be the best business possible, your employees must be productive. Happy workers can go a long way towards meeting that goal. 

Variables You Need to Consider 

You need to consider several variables before considering a four-day workweek for your employees. Here are a few

• Industry Type - Certain industries may find it easier to adopt a four-day workweek due to the nature of their work and flexibility. In contrast, others, such as retail or healthcare, may face more challenges due to operational requirements.
• Company Culture and Policy - Company culture and existing policies play a significant role in your ability to offer a four-day workweek. Organizations with a flexible and adaptive culture may find it easier to implement changes than those with more rigid considerations.
• Productivity and Efficiency - One of the major considerations is whether a four-day workweek will maintain or enhance productivity. Studies have shown mixed results, with some indicating increased productivity due to improved work-life balance and employee morale, while others suggest potential drawbacks like longer workdays and reduced efficiency.
• Financial Implications - Employers need to assess the financial implications of a four-day workweek, including potential costs associated with restructuring schedules, overtime pay, and changes in productivity.
• Customer Support - Meeting customer demands for support may be challenging for industries that regularly face customers, such as retail or hospitality.
• Geographic and Cultural Factors - Cultural attitudes towards work and leisure time vary across regions, impacting the acceptance and effectiveness of a four-day workweek.

The fact that such a large percentage of businesses are considering the viability of a four-day workweek gives credence to how it can positively affect a business. For more great business and technology content, stop back to our blog soon. 

Data Backup

Your business’ data is your most valuable asset. This data offers your business essential functionality and utility that simply could not be replicated to scale if it were lost. Therefore, we always recommend that businesses prioritize their disaster recovery planning, including a robust and frequently updated data backup of their entire infrastructure.

Modern data backups are not only more accessible to businesses of every size (largely thanks to another item on this list), they are also far simpler to manage and more effective for it. We recommend that any backups you implement follow what is known as the 3-2-1 Backup Rule: at least three copies of your data should exist, in at least two locations, at least one of which being offsite and cut off from your infrastructure.

Cybersecurity

Did you know that there were over an estimated 30 billion known records breached in Q1 of this year? That’s an insanely high number, especially when Q4 of 2023 saw a tenth of that total.

A data breach isn’t something that a small or even medium-sized organization can just shrug off. First off, there’s the fact that data has presumably been stolen while it was under your care. This alone is sure to impact your business’ reputation… then there’s all the regulatory consequences you might face, the cost of identifying and resolving the vulnerability after the fact, and ensuring that no further trace of any threat exists. In short, you need to do everything you can to prevent these breaches, monitoring your infrastructure to keep watch for any indication of something going wrong.

VoIP Communications

Any business can benefit from saving some costs, and Voice over Internet Protocol telephony is a great means of doing so. Modern telephone systems can operate entirely off the Internet, adding significant utility, accessibility, and value to your business’ phone. With exception to some initial equipment investments (which are largely up to your discretion), the only real cost to VoIP is the price of your Internet service… which you’re already paying anyway.

That’s right… VoIP allows you to take advantage of a more capable phone system, offering more features and accessibility, for less money than a conventional phone line. 

SMBs should be paying attention to opportunities like this.

Cloud

Speaking of cost savings, there’s another significant expense that SMBs now have the opportunity to avoid with the help of technology: data storage.

Storage space is expensive. Not only does the server infrastructure itself cost a lot to procure, powering it isn’t exactly cheap… plus, it takes up a significant amount of space that could potentially be used in other ways that might contribute to your business’ monetization. Traditional filing cabinets are worse, as there’s a much more finite limit on the space you have to keep data, and it’s even harder to keep a backup of this kind of data.

By utilizing the shared storage space of the cloud, however, you can eliminate the need for bulky cabinets or large, expensive server infrastructure in your office… and this is just the start of what the cloud can help you accomplish. The cloud also allows you a variety of other utilities that make doing business easier and more accessible, as well.

Managed IT

Finally, small and medium-sized businesses are just as reliant on technology as the big businesses are. The only real difference is the fact that the big businesses can much more easily afford to maintain internal teams to keep all their technology functioning.

This doesn’t mean that SMBs have to go without, however. Managed IT services exist to help businesses of all sizes keep their technology working for them and their needs. Monitoring a business’ infrastructure can reveal issues that, if left unresolved, could lead to security or operational issues. Plus, a business’ team can always use a resource to turn to for support and assistance with the everyday technical issues they might experience.

As a Managed Service Provider, We Can Deliver All of the Above…and More!

Patriot Tech Services Inc. has helped many businesses around TriState fulfill their IT needs, and we’d love to help your organization as well.

Give us a call at 877-874-4629 to get started.