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)?
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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 The rules were put in place in the Obama era, repealed by Ajit Pai’s FCC, but some states were looking to implement their own net neutrality laws and the ISPs knew that the rules might come back when FCC leadership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
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