I support net neutrality as I understand it. But the repeal of net neutrality in 2017 and its recent reinstatement has had no discernable effect on my personal internet usage. What should I have noticed? Or what should I notice going forward?
In: Technology
Net neutrality was more about internet service providers being allowed to, and then forbidden again from, biasing their services towards or against individual websites.
Imagine a big website (Amazon for example) paid an internet service provider to make traffic to their website faster but traffic going to other, smaller online stores go slower. People online are notoriously impatient, so if it seemed like the small stores were always slow, people would start shifting more to Amazon (or just giving up on the small store without buying anything) out of impatience.
Effectively, it would give major companies ways to sneakily strangle smaller companies out of internet traffic and deny them business without doing anything themselves, paying off ISPs to do it instead.
The insidious part of non-neutral behavior is that the scheme is often that the effects are not obvious to the end user. YouTube internet makes YouTube videos faster than Vimeo and traffic naturally shifts. The fact that the performance is sabotaged isn’t known to the user base. They just go to where the “good service” is.
“Net neutrality” means “your internet provider needs to give you the same speeds on their end no matter what website you go to”.
“Repeal net neutrality” means “your internet provider is allowed to take money from some websites to give you a full speed connection to them but a slowed-down connection to their competitors”.
First, as others have mentioned, it can be difficult to identify non-neutral actions be internet service providers because the most nefarious non-neutral policies involve slowing access to certain content to the point where you’re likely to look for an alternative, but not actually blocking or charging for that content.
Secondly, following the repeal, Congress was actively considering new laws and there was significant scrutiny of ISPs that resulted in many providers not changing internet traffic patterns despite the repeal.
However, there were cases of non-neutral activity. So called “zero-rating” plans, where certain data or app usage would be exempt from data limits/plan data caps.
There were also cases of throttling, such as AT&T throttling certain data users which the FTC sued AT&T over:
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/att-data-throttling-refunds
I think it’s worth noting that although net neutrality was repealed at the federal level by the FCC in 2017, many states have net neutrality laws, and the reality is that for a lot of ISPs it’s just easier to practice net neutrality in general rather than try to have different systems for each of those state’s laws.
It’s kind of like how even if you don’t live in California, you’ll still come across a lot of products with labels regarding California’s requirements about chemicals that are potentially linked to cancer. It’s just easier/safer for some manufacturers to put those labels on every item they make, rather than just the ones that necessarily have those chemicals and are expected to be sold in California.
Going back to net neutrality, even when it was repealed by the FCC in 2017, a lot of the ISPs didn’t start prioritizing various websites and signing deals with various sites to do so because it’d be a confusing mess to deal with in regards to state laws, and also because they probably viewed it as likely that federal net neutrality laws would be reinstated whenever a Dem administration took over again.
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