In the wake of the FCC’s recent passage of 400 pages of Net Neutrality regulations designating the internet as a public utility, the average business owner could be forgiven for feeling bewildered as to what actually happened.
Bewilderment is justified for two reasons. First, the topic of Net Neutrality is inherently complex due to the network principles it impacts – from protocols to provisioning to peering. Meanwhile, corporate entities with vested financial interests in the Net Neutrality debate added an extra layer of complexity with PR seemingly calculated to confuse matters for the non-technical information seeker.
The bottom line is that if you wish to gain a better grasp on Net Neutrality, you may be best served by first identifying what net neutrality isn’t.
Imagining a Non-Neutral Net
The intended outcome of the FCC’s Net Neutrality regulations is to preserve the same freedoms on the Internet that we enjoy in day-to-day life, like unrestricted political speech and freedom of the press. Also, your Internet access provider should not be able to restrict the sites you visit.
Here are a few examples of what could happen in the absence of a neutral internet:
– An Internet service provider blocking access to the sites of political parties or candidates whose views are not aligned with their corporate interests
– A large national ISP implementing pay-to-play restrictions on a content provider – for instance, making the a streaming provider to pay special access feesif it wishes to sell HD video to the ISP’s customers
– An ISP blocking results for a competitor’s website or blocking content unflattering to that ISP
Ultimate Outcomes
Until reading this, you may have forgotten all about the Net Neutrality debate in the few short weeks that intervened since the passage of the regulations. That’s in keeping with the intended impact of the regulations: not to make changes to the way we use the internet, but simply to prevent abuses like those imagined above from occurring – to preserve the Internet in the free & open state to which we’ve become accustomed, but should not take for granted.
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