How do we make NetNeutrality an election issue… For the right reasons!

Over the last two years whenever I have spoken in public or given seminars related to technology I have taken the opportunity to expose the public to the NetNeutrality issue.

At the beginning of all of this, nine times out of ten the initial reaction that I perceive is one that can be compared to the “blinded deer (or moose) in the middle of the road look”, its to technical and fundamental. But these day’s I am noticing a distinct change in people’s knowledge of the subject, they know more about the issue but to them it’s all about “running out of bandwidth”.

Within two years people have gone from not knowing about the issue to having opinions that are completely off the mark. The only explanation that I have for this takes its roots in the amount of news reports that talk of Net Neutrality from a “running out of bandwidth” perspective.

It’s an unfortunate example of how the press has simplified a story so much that it looses its core truths. NetNeutrality is now a casualty, and suffers from journalist’s lack of research initiative and the unfortunate realities that come with having all but 30-60 to talk about a subject in news reports.

People don’t know don’t grasp the importance of the issue and its not a real “sexy” subject so I can understand it doesn’t get a lot of air play, but when you stop and thing about the implications of loosing the Net Neutrality battle it tends to give me nightmares.

While the candidates for the next US presidential elections are talking about it with the right terminology and from the right perspective, the media and politicians here in Canada are only slowly waking up and unfortunately they are signing the wrong tune and marching to the wrong beat.

In my original blog post on this subject I asked what we could do to put NetNeutrality on the table with other election issues. Today, we seem to have take a few big steps back and the real question becomes how do fix the publics perception of the issue?