Whether it’s free speech, privacy, security, or regulation, the Internet has been treated quite poorly by laws and regulations.

As the Internet is growing from a luxury to a utility, like power and plumbing, legislation surrounding Internet services is not following the same path. Amid the battle over net neutrality, Comcast(America’s largest Internet service provider) has announced their acquisition of Time Warner Cable(the second largest ISP).

While similar mergers, like AT&T’s attempted purchase of T-Mobile, have been blocked by congress, Comcast’s purchase of Time Warner might pass as a result of questionable reasons.

While the companies’ areas of coverage very rarely overlap, more factors should be considered in determining the effect on the market’s competition. The significant profit growth Comcast would experience could allow for a major drop in prices. That might sound great at first, but the lower prices would eliminate competitors, and when there is no alternative source, the supplier can raise prices as high as they want.

In January, a federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to enforce their net neutrality policy. Net neutrality is a policy that ensures all ISP’s treat all web traffic as equal. They couldn’t slow down or speed up connections for some sites and they couldn’t block traffic to any site.

While it, truthfully, wasn’t very effective, net neutrality tried to prevent corruption from invading the provision of the Internet. While Verizon lead the legal opposition to net neutrality, the policy’s elimination has a much bigger impact on companies that produce content as well as provide service, companies like the one that owns Universal Studios and NBC – Comcast.

This level of corruption cannot be allowed to hinder the growth of such an explosive market. In my mind, access to the Internet needs to be handled like electricity. The Internet is no longer a luxury service but a basic utility used in an exponentially increasing part of our lives.

The companies that provide every home electricity follow rules that prevent corruption and protect consumers. A company can’t put a box in every outlet that recognizes what’s being plugged into it and determines whether or not it should be powered, and that’s what net neutrality stopped for the Internet.

Whenever you plug a lamp into a wall outlet, you expect it to be powered. For a certain fee, you are provided very reliable access to more power than you will ever need. With the Internet, providers are holding the market back. The infrastructure that is used to provide access is not being upgraded nearly as much as it should be. This means that the service is less reliable, and speeds are slower – which is like only being able to plug in one lamp at a time.

The technology is available to upgrade the infrastructure to a point where few people would ever use even close to as much of the access available. This happened to power companies long ago. If you want, you can turn on all the lights, turn on every appliance, turn on every single thing in your house that uses electricity, and the only thing that would happen is an above average bill. Currently, you can activate everything in your house that relies on the Internet, and at a certain point, they will all experience a reduction in access that increases with each subsequent device that attempts to access the Internet.

The government will never be able to regulate the Internet, nor should they. Instead, they need to recognize its true nature and incredible potential. The government needs to protect the Internet from being corrupted by the selfish greed of service providers. The content of the Internet deserves to be treated as if it were a sovereign nation, and access to that content needs to be treated like access to electricity.