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
The idea is that the company that sells you internet access shouldn’t be able to restrict what you do with it or throttle content they don’t like.
For example your ISP might decide that they want to partner with Disney and therefore ensure that their customers have access to Disney+ but throttle access to Netflix to the point where it is unwatchable or make people pay extra to access Facebook at more than dialup speed. It is to prevent the people who own your ISP from deciding that a newspaper who reports badly on them should have access to their website limited or to for example during an election to make access to one candidates web-presence much more usable than to anothers.
There are places where cheap internet access comes with restrictions to only work with certain platforms. And many companies that own ISP also own their own content on the internet: web-portals, streaming media etc. In the early days of the internet some ISP mostly allowed access to stuff like email and their own walled garden and not the wider internet.
So the fear is not completely unjustified even if we haven’t seen any big pushes towards making the worst predictions come true.
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