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
It was more or less a business to business relationship that spilled out into the public sphere.
There’s two types of businesses involved: ISPs and media companies. ISPs would be your internet provider like Comcast Or AT&T. Media companies would be companies like Netflix or Disney. The other key thing is that media companies use bandwidth that the ISPs have to send content to you.
The media companies use a lot of bandwidth, so the ISPs had a lot of reason to negotiate and monitor them. In addition, there was a trend about 10-15 years ago where the ISPs were buying up their own media companies. So the thought around net neutrality is that they want to make sure ISPs don’t favor their own media companies by restricting bandwidth and/or charging a ton of money to the other media companies. Net neutrality ultimately went away due to certain parties gaining power in government.
In practice, what’s happened is that ISPs have increased their bandwidth so it’s less of an issue than before. In addition, several of the ISPs have either sold off their media companies (eg AT&T and HBO Max) or are doing very terribly at it (Comcast and Peacock). So even though net neutrality is not in force, it doesn’t seem like a major issue right now.
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