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
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The concept basically boils down to “any entity should not be able to influence bandwidth and discoverability based off of the content”.
This means any sort of entity that provides internet access should not throttle or deny access to any website if it expresses views that don’t match the provider’s.
There are parts of it that could make sense, such as piracy an shit. But the main concern is what I stated above.
It means that all traffic on the internet has the same priority.
Stuff like: your ISP can’t slow down all non-google search engines because google pays them.
A neutral net functions like a road network. No matter what your destination is, you can drive the same speed limit as everyone else. In a non-neutral net people can pay extra to reserve an entire highway lane just for themselves, or a business can rent a lane solely for people who want to shop at their place (and both of these obviously slow down everyone else because there is only so much road/internet)
Easiest way to oversimplify a complicated problem
Anyone can use internet however they want with net neutrality.
If no net neutrality, only those who pay the most money can use it however they want. Everyone else has to pay up or be restricted.
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.
Net neutrality means the netwerk operator, between the source and the destination of the traffic, remains neutral and doesn’t manipulate the traffic itself, nor handles it differently.
Common things internet providers (ISPs) do that are **not** neutral:
* Make certain traffic slower and other traffic faster.
* Make certain traffic not count against your bandwidth limit. Often in favor of websites they’ve partnered with.
* Make certain content unavailable to you.
* In the old days, when not everything was encrypted: Replace ads on websites by their own ads.
If net neutrality is not enforced by regulations, ISP will basically able to perform blackmail:
– To popular websites: We will throtle your speed untill you pay.
– To users: You can only access this website with the premium subscription.
In it’s simplest form, it was basically a rule that kept ISPs from influencing bandwidth and what you could look up, like for example slowing your internet connection *way* down if you’re looking at a site that doesn’t conform with the companies views.
Or, let’s say COX/Comcast/whatever ISP strikes a deal with X streaming service, on X streaming service your internet works fine, but now W/Y/Z streaming services are throttled and you can only view them at 360p due to them slowing your internet down.
Or one of said ISPs has a deal with google, so google loads perfectly fine, but then you try to use something like Yahoo, they can slow it down entirely to barely load.
Net Neutrality was giving users the freedom to use the internet as they please, rather than being forced to conform to a companies views/policy.
A number of years ago, Comcast was basically caught making Netflix video perform poorly for their customers. This might have been before the 4k era, but at the time watching 4k would have been impossible, and even 1080p might not work or it would stutter.
At the time it was known Netflix was in “negotiations” with Comcast ending with Netflix paying comcast actual money. After that, Netflix performance for Comcast customers improved. Yeah, that actually happened.
Net Neutrality is about companies like comcast NOT being allowed to do things like that. The internet is meant to be an equal, level playing field for everybody and internet provides are not allowed to play favourites.
One common concern is that the Internet could become like TV is, with “packages”. Want Youtube? Pay your internet provider a few extra dollars. Don’t worry, Facebook is part of the base package and is free. No, we don’t want that to happen and unfortunately we may need laws to prevent it from happening.
Your internet connection is basically defined by how it arrives to you. Cable and fiber are the top speed options these days, and the wiring is owned by your TV provider for the cable, and whoever put in the fiber for that. Phone wire is an option but it’s relatively slow. So, most people have really limited options and can’t just “shop around” so easily if their existing internet providers decide to do a dick move.
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.
Think of the internet as a road system. There are companies that maintain the roads, and there are companies that use the roads to ship products. If you want trucks to be able to get to your house, you have to pay the maintenance company a fee to build that road and keep it drivable. Companies that ship products also have to pay a toll to use the roads. Under net neutrality, you can order stuff from any supplier and they will be able to send a truck to your door in an equal amount of time. However, without net neutrality, the road maintenance company can build fast lanes or give priority access to companies they like. Maybe you prefer one companies over another but the road company doesn’t have a deal with them. In that case you might have to buy a worse or more expensive product from a competitor because they are the only ones who can deliver things when you need them.
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).
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