John Newell

Save my online Biostatistical Consultancy

I am a 68 year old semi-retired biostatistical consultant. In my online business that makes my family financially independent I access hundreds of different academic and medical sites on the internet per month.

To earn my keep from my consulting customers I have to deliver answers to questions of medical study designs, questions of data interpretation, and best practices to publish the results of new biomedical investigations. And I have to deliver these answers quickly and efficiently to keep my customers. Undoubtedly, most of the sites I need in my work will not be able to afford the "facilitated access" that a non-neutral internet would require. Only the giant retailers will be able to do that.

I also use those retail sites for many of my personal purchases because arthritis has limited my mobility. Why would you want to adopt a policy that would both threaten the income of an otherwise independent elder and remove a paying customer from the lists of the online retailers (because of loss of income)?

The FCC needs to protect citizens like me as well as our American corporations. In addition, this citizen was a participant in the early packet network experiments with the Arpanet that led to the Internet. As a computer manager at Harvard my group participated in very early Arpanet communications with other academic sites via the Harvard and Bolt Beranek and Newman nodes. Am I to be deprived of open use of a resource that I, in a small way, helped to develop?

John B. Newell
West Newton, MA 02465