I remember people flipping out about it a few years ago and tried looking into it, but I was still confused on what it actually is. I recently heard the term come up again while watching an older video on YouTube and was hoping someone could simplify it
In: Technology
That’s OK, pretty much everyone is confused about what it is.
Bottom line, at least in the US, Net Neutrality means that the government regulates it as a utility under laws from the depression era that applied to both utilities and transportation (“common carrier”). In exchange for the government telling them how to run their business (including mandating that they must treat all traffic equally, and must get permission to expand, contract, or change their service offerings and footprint, and setting prices), they’re granted monopolies over certain territories.
The federal government moved *away* from this concept (“deregulation”) in 1976 for airlines (where Southwest had a major role in bringing it about) , and in the early 1980s for telcos, which broke up the Bell system and is ultimately what allowed cable providers to move into telephone and internet service, where the telcos had a monopoly on telecommunications (back in those days, the internet came over the telephone, now it’s the other way around).
Latest Answers