I saw a short article about it this evening, but tbh I didn’t pay much attention to the Net Neutrality stuff from years ago so I don’t fully get it. What are the effects if it changes (or doesn’t)?
In: 142
The proposed rules from the Federal Communications Commission will designate internet service — both the wired kind found in homes and businesses as well as mobile data on cellphones — as “essential telecommunications” akin to traditional telephone services, said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. The rules would ban internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or slowing down access to websites and online content.
In addition to the prohibitions on blocking and throttling internet traffic, the draft rules also seek to prevent ISPs from selectively speeding up service to favored websites or to those that agree to pay extra fees, Rosenworcel said, a move designed to prevent the emergence of “fast lanes” on the web that could give some websites a paid advantage over others.
From CNN…
basically, net neutrality is about preventing the Internet Service Providers (ISPs.) from playing preference to specific companies or types of traffic that suit their interests. I’ll give an example
Say your the sole provider of internet backbone to a region (like a city). The public might buy internet form several difference companies but it all travels over *your* cables to get out to the wider world. One day, Microsoft approaches you and offers to pay you a butt-load of money to give X-box traffic higher priority over Playstation traffic.
You take the money, and fiddle with the code in your core routers, and boom! suddenly every PlayStation player in the city is getting serious lag and bandwidth issues. the Xbox players are unaffected. frustrated with thier bad service, more gamers move over to Xbox in that region.
thats the sort of thing that net neutrality was supposed to prevent happening. it mandates that all traffic is treated equally by the ISP, with no preferential system in place.
These two links do a relatively good job explaining it.
Essentially Net Neutrality is telling ISPs that all internet traffic must be treated equally. That you as an ISP can choose which websites have faster access.
Edit – Can’t choose.
ISPs, if given the chance, would prioritize some sites over others. Leading people to use those sites over their competitors. Net Neutrality was like “Nah dog, thats whack. Keep them equal”
What net neutrality is has been answered well in my opinion: ISPs have to treat all internet traffic equally.
>What are the effects if it changes (or doesn’t)?
For that other part of your question, honestly at the moment, not that much.
In typical fashion for ISPs, they haven’t gone full hog on rent seeking from content providers yet. The rules were put in place in the Obama era, repealed by Ajit Pai’s FCC, but some states were looking to implement their own net neutrality laws and the ISPs knew that the rules might come back when FCC leadership changed.
This means that they were on their “pinky swear, we don’t need net neutrality because we already do what is says” behavior. Classic corporate tactic for regulations. They say it’s not needed when they follow what the regulations say they should do, but if there are not regulations, once profits aren’t what they want them to be, you can bet they’ll do a 180 if they think they can get away with it. The ISPs weren’t there yet, so not much will change.
What it does is prevent change for the worse. Don’t forget that we’re talking about ISPs that were complaining Netflix, YouTube, etc. were hammering their networks with lots of traffic and that they should be paid for the “attack” on their networks. However, the ISPs customers already pay them for Internet access and the traffic from Netflix, YouTube, etc. is traffic requested by those paying customers.
This video sums it up well for what ISPs might do without it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JucFpDhuF98
Here’s a real-world example from Canada:
When I first hooked up Internet service in my home, I was with a company called Shaw. I was mostly satisfied; the only problem was that the monthly bill was outstripping my budget.
I cancelled service with Shaw and moved to another company — a wholesaler, that used Shaw’s ‘pipes’ to provide their service.
To my surprise, this new company offered the same service level that I was getting with Shaw at a lower price — *and* I found that my download speeds were *significantly* faster*.* I’d had 1 or 2 mB/s with Shaw; this new company was a steady 10 mB/s.
Now, the argument that the big telcos in the United States have consistently given is that they *own* the pipes, so they should control how they’re used. Net Neutrality says ‘no, that’s not how this works; you’ve got to offer the *same* quality of service to *everyone* that’s paying for it, without preferential treatment’.
There’s a very real fear that revoking Net Neutrality will result in the creation of a ‘tiered’ Internet, where an ISP charges a fee to have someone ‘bumped up’ to a higher-quality tier, where their data is treated preferentially over that of those that can’t or won’t pay.
So, if Sam’s Small Start-Up begins to look like a viable competitor for Barry’s Big Business, Barry can just pay the fee for the higher tier of service and his site will operate more efficiently than Sam’s, making Sam’s company the less-preferable option and driving customers to Barry’s website simply because it’s better than slogging through Sam’s slower-loading site on the ‘lower’ tier.
That has the potential to stifle competition, because smaller start-ups are less likely to be able to *afford* the faster tier, and big companies like Google have *billions* of dollars to support it.
If the FCC maintains Net Neutrality, that will not happen. Service providers will not be permitted to make that kind of deal; if Sam’s Small Start-Up pays for service with their local telco, Barry’s Big Business will have to compete with Sam on an equal footing.
They’ll both load at approximately the same speed, so they’ll both have an equal chance to compete in their market.
Right now, nothing much will change. ISPs are generally sticking to net neutrality on their own for a variety of reasons. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in the rules/regulations.
I’m not for isp messing with people’s sites speeds. But if Netflix wants to pay for a dedicated fast lane for their services inside the att network I have no problem with that. Just as long as att doesn’t on purposely slow down Netflix data to force this.
It creates loopholes for people to charge you more. Net neutrality incentivizes companies to stop making new infrastructure, so you will be stuck on old technology. This is an if it aint broke, don’t fix it situation. We’ve never needed new laws for net neutrality and adding new laws wont make it better. Uneducated people will make claims about throttling certain networks, which does not make sense as most things are on the cloud.
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