Last Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission took a vote on Net Neutrality and repealed its previously established rules. Now, providers are allowed to speed up, slow down, or block certain websites only if they inform the public; all violators will be handled by the Federal Trade Commission, not the FCC.
“This decision puts the Federal Communications Commission on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the American public,” said Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel in her opposing .
Net neutrality is the policy that ensures that internet service providers and governments should treat all data and information on the internet equally and to not discriminate or charge more because of the user, the content, or the mode of communication. The fact that now people might have to pay more for fast internet from their providers has had arisen threat of lawsuits.
“I’m shocked — shocked! — that people are going to challenge this decision in court,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said sarcastically to reporters after the vote.
Under President George W. Bush, the FCC established that all consumers had the right to the four fundamental freedoms online: The freedom to access any online content of their choice, so long as it was legal; the freedom to use any online application; the freedom to use their home broadband connections on any device; and, the freedom to get subscription information from their own providers.
It was first unveiled in a speech in 2004 by then Republican Chairman Michael Powell and it was formalized as an “Internet policy statement” in 2005. The policy was non-binding and didn’t force on the new regulation. However, this all changed in 2010 when the FCC approved its first net neutrality rules.
These rules were an attempt of the FCC to use the Internet policy statement to punish Comcast’s alleged peer-to-peer file sharing traffic block in 2007; it banned providers from blocking and slowing internet to users.
But the regulations were challenged by Verizon, arguing that the FCC had abused of the authority Congress had given them. After three years of legal action, a federal appeals court sided against the FCC in 2014 and stuck down on the commission’s most important provisions of the regulation.
The court argued that the FCC had tried to regulate Internet providers in the same way it regulates traditional telecom companies, but without first identifying broadband as a telecommunications service.
The FCC then approved new rules in 2015 that classified Internet providers as telecom providers and then imposed some of the same bans on blocking and slowing as it had before. Broadband companies were furious since these new rules opened up space for more regulations and opened doors for possible government price control.
An industrial alliance filed a lawsuit against the then Democratic-led FCC and there was another court battle. But this time the agency won, with a three-judge panel in 2016 upholding the regulations despite the edits.
Then came President Donald Trump, imposing Republican control of the FCC. GOP officials felt as if Democrats had run over Republicans on net neutrality, and Ajit Pai — who is now the Chairman of the FCC — vowed to undo his predecessor’s legacy.
“The net neutrality debate is about protections for consumers and has bounced between the FCC and courts for too long,” said Noah Theran, a spokesman for the Internet Association, which represents tech firms in Washington told the Washington Post.
Now, with the newly repealed rules, internet providers can begin blocking access to websites or throttling connection speeds as early as January 2018. Internet providers will be free to set up a two-way toll: it’ll charge subscribers to access the internet and charge websites to access users. They’ll be forced to tell consumers that it has decided to block access to certain websites or they may in the future according to the regulations Chairman Pai has set.
Big internet companies will most likely get to set the price for fast service, regulating most websites to a slower internet.
Ever since Pai announced the vote in May, the internet exploded. oVER 23 million comments were submitted, though some are suspected to be fraudulent. Because of these complications, members of Congress and the FCC called for the FCC to delay Thursday’s vote until they sort out irregularities for the benefit of the public and to get authentic results. But that didn’t happen and it might fuel the fire for lawsuits against the delay.
Once the rules are enacted, however, it’s unlikely that dramatic changes to the internet will happen overnight. The changes will introduce themselves gradually over time.
Big news companies may load faster than small news companies. Your favorite local restaurant may switch to just hosting its web presence on Yelp entirely instead of having its own website, which might be much slower to load.
The changes would eventually change user online habits and drastically change online presence and smaller websites will shy away from big companies who could afford to pay fast-lane prices.
With this change, the internet may never be the way it was before.
