A long time ago, corporations took pride in the way they treated their employees and customers. It used to be seen as a positive to invest time and money to make your company a better place to work and do business. It used to be a privilege to have a good employee.

Then, in the ‘70s and ‘80s the corporate paradigm shifted and put return on shareholders’ investments as the number-one priority for business. Playing the stock market game meant they would do just about anything to edge out their competitor, and now the bulk of CEO paychecks are directly tied to the bonuses they get for improving the company’s stock.

This has led to companies putting customers and employees at the bottom of the priority list. This might be happening again very soon, in a very big way, and our government is going to give its stamp of approval.

It’s no secret that Internet companies are highly disliked by the public. Time Warner Cable and Comcast are consistently at the bottom of customer service and customer satisfaction surveys, but they don’t really care because they’ve made it a point to limit consumers’ other options for Internet service. Don’t like Time Warner? Fine, but where else are you going to go?

If you are drawing a blank, you are exactly where they want you to be. When we have nowhere else to go, they can feel free to raise prices or cut service however they please. Right now they are fighting to end net neutrality — treating all Internet users the same — and this will likely result in a huge service cut.

If net neutrality is ended, your cable company could slow down your Netflix stream so that it is constantly buffering, and make you pay more to speed it back up. This was the case for a brief time, and Netflix revealed that they were losing customers because Comcast had slowed them down.

We often think of the U.S. as the world’s leader in technology. But take a look at the top 10 Internet speeds for citizens around the world.

Guess which country you won’t find in the top 10.

This is because competition has been eliminated so thoroughly that Internet companies now think ending net neutrality is a good thing. In fact, at 10.5 Mbps we come in at number 12 in the latest State of the Internet report, with many Asian and European countries averaging 50 percent faster speeds. AT&T and Verizon even argued recently that 4 Mbps is fast enough, and could still be classified as “broadband speed.”

Chattanooga, Tennessee had enough of this and built its own broadband. Speeds up to 1 GB are available from their municipal Internet service provider. The average speeds there are some of the fastest on the planet, but big Internet corporations couldn’t have this. They have gone to work, forking out loads of money to block this from happening in other states, and are now trying to block the Chattanooga company from expanding to other areas.

Those in favor of ending net neutrality have only one argument: “companies would never slow down speeds intentionally because it would hurt their reputation and business.” The only problem is that same argument was made about toxic mortgage bundles, right before Wall Street banks contributed to the collapse of our economy.

Over 1 million citizens have asked the Federal Communications Commission to enforce net neutrality so the U.S. does not become a second world nation online. Whether or not they listen will be a marker of who they actually govern for—the people, or big business. In an election year we must make this the top campaign issue, or we might lose even more Internet freedom than we already have.

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