Beau Pinkham returns to #SPSM to get us up to date on how this week’s net neutrality vote may impact suicide prevention innovation and efforts, 11/19/17, 9pCT.

Watch the conversation LIVE here:

Here’s Beau’s quick and dirty review:

Basically, boils down to several theoretical possibilities:

1. If Net Neutrality is gutted/removed, this could drive more people to use various methods to hide their online presence to get around the throttling that the various companies would put in place. I’m talking about VPN’s – I’m unsure of how else someone would do that, but nature finds a way (for instance, this might also push people to be a bit more open about trying to do things like getting on neighbor’s wifi, etc. – think cable-jacking from the 80’s and 90’s when cable prices started hitting a much higher figure)
2. Also bad, but probably not as bad – every single domain host will have to start working nicely with all the different ISP’s. So what if you’re doing telehealth through a website that doesn’t have a good relationship with, say, Comcast? What if Mediacom doesn’t like the domain host for your chat service? Etc. These are all things that will eventually be ironed out but we don’t have a timeframe for it and what it might look like.
3. This would allow unprecedented amount of control by companies regarding who could see what while using the Internet. We all know that suicide could easily become a political issue – what if an Internet company decided to block access to certain websites regarding suicide/suicide prevention based on political or religious beliefs?
4. We don’t know how this will impact social media at all. Maybe not at all – maybe as drastically as what we’d probably see with Netflix/Hulu/etc.
5. This puts even more barriers in place for agencies to start new online initiatives. If a crisis center cannot quickly react to changes and develop new ways of communicating with people online, that could rapidly harm their ability to seek funding and grow the way we want to see crisis centers grow.