The Walmart Owns The Roads Analogy For Net Neutrality

So, I came up with an analogy for net neutrality to explain it to people who don't really understand it very well. I wanted to see what other people thought about it.

Imagine Walmart owns the road system of America. The roads to Walmart are massive pristine highways with an 80 MPH speed limit that go directly to every local store and they are free to drive on. The roads to every other store, like Target, or Menards, or your local brick and mortar family owned general store, are shitty, filled with potholes, have a 30 mile an hour speed limit, and are incredibly roundabout and force you to drive ten times as far just to get to those stores. Unless you go on their obscenely expensive toll roads which charge you $50 every time you use them. Those roads to Walmart competitors are very nice.

Odds are most people will end up going to Walmart, it would be cheap and easy. I like this analogy because Walmart already has a reputation for not being the nicest place on earth and it gives a pretty good idea of what it means for ISPs to be free of the restrictions that prevent them from doing these types of things in terms of something the average American can understand.

I think you should stick with the postal/package delivery and road keeper/road toll analogy, since that's basically what an internet connection is.

The topic of net neutrality isn't the neglect of infrastructure, but controlling the flow of information. While they both have the same root in the case of net neutrality in the USA, and they shouldn't be mixed up. Net neutrality also affects perfectly servicable roads, after all.

If you haven't viewed ViHart's latest video, it's pretty good. It's not something you can show something to someone not read up on net neutrality, but it contains most of what anyone (who is) would need to inform that person.