Today, the Internet broke. Due to some contract litigation between Cogent (a tier 1 ISP) and Sprint, Sprint decided to cut Cogent off from its network. What this means is basically that the Internet is segmented. Both companies are significant providers and many businesses have been affected by this severance.

For example, our ISP at work is Cogent, and as the BlackBerry admin, I need to access Sprint online to manage our account. Sprint’s pages are unreachable since I am on Cogent, so no work for me. Furthermore, a site called uscourts.gov is also on Sprint, so no filings for our attorneys.

Because my firm is large, we have different ISPs and can reroute traffic through other sites. Other businesses do not have this luxury, and the segmenting of the Internet that Sprint has caused is borderline illegal. At this point, the Internet is important nationwide and worldwide infrastructure, and a company shoudn’t be able to segment it willy-nilly.

For anyone who has considered being opposed to net neutrality- this is the nightmare situation.  For monetary reasons alone, one company decides to stop letting another connect to its portion of the Internet, and we are just screwed. We can’t do anything about it other than lobby for data to be able to pass the arbitrary barrier. Mr. Sprint, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!

We need to allow for interconnectibility on the Internet, just like other important infrastructure. Companies cannot decide to refuse service over contract negotiations, simply because it will cause too many problems and can even lead to national security risks when government servers are involved.

Hopefully, either Sprint or the Federal Government will come to its senses. Please support net neutrality, especially if you are one of my users. Otherwise, your Sprint aircard won’t let you VPN into the Boston office, and that’s something you care about! The Internet wants to be free!!