I think the hard part here for many people, myself included, is that there’s SO MUCH information and misinformation about this issue floating around.
Comcast says that “we support bipartisan congressional action to permanently preserve and solidify net neutrality for consumers and end the cycle of regulatory ping pong.” But does an average twitter user have any idea what Comcast is saying here or what they actually want? Wasn’t Comcast in favor of ending net neutrality to begin with?
Then I see Donald Trump Jr. openly mocking the outrage over net neutrality’s repeal, saying that he’d pay money to a complainer that can actually explain the issue in detail.
That that, someone responded with "prior to the proliferation of high speed internet, there wasn’t much need to enforce neutrality, and once it became prevalent in the early '00s the FCC assumed ISPs would largely avoid discriminating among traffic. Well, that wasn’t the case, but the methods of doing so were pretty rudimentary by today’s sandards and streaming services weren’t a big part of the type of traffic they carried.
When Obama took office, his FCC decided it would take regulatory action to prevent this from happening, so they put in place the Open Internet Order of 2010 which among other things prevented ISPs from discriminating among traffic. The ISPs sued, saying the FCC didn’t have the right to regulate them because they were not classified as common carriers and a court agreed.
So in 2015, the FCC classified them as common carriers. Now it’s 2017 and the FCC wants to give these ISPs the right to discriminate among web traffic. Now, you might say that the 2015 rule stifles competition and decreases investment. Well, I’d say that the physical backbone of the Internet (which the ISPs run) really should be treated as a public good, as we do with telephone infrastructure.
Not only for the liberal do-gooder reasons that you probably don’t care about, but also because it’s vital to the flow of commerce. Software and ecommerce companies have grown based on the expectation that traffic would be treated fairly. Now Comcast or Verizon or Time Warner might try to extort them. Think about the millions of people who work for software, ecommerce or other technology companies. Livelihoods depend on cable companies treating them fairly. Anyway, you’re a ■■■■■■■ moron."
So… Here we have what appears to be a well reasoned, well nuanced explanation of the issue. But do we think that people’s livelihoods are really at stake here? Can the people that could potentially be adversely affected by the FCC’s net neutrality repeal afford to assume that ISPs will treat them the way they had in the past before the Obama administration came in with the intention of preemptively preventing traffic discrimination?
It sounds absurd to think that ISPs would be allowed to legally extort, from the small businesses up to the Google’s of the world, and yet people seem legitimately scared by this, not simply because they’re told by so many to be scared (though that’s part of it, I’m sure), but because it genuinely feels like there are stakes here, with massive stakeholders on either side and the rest of us caught in the middle.
The ISP side seems to talk about the need for freedom from government over regulation, but from what I’ve seen in the news over the last several years, the more power people and corporations tend to have, the more they tend to abuse it to our detriment. So if these ISPs decide to make changes that could harm consumers, how long before the uprising over those changes ends and those changes simply become the new, begrudgingly accepted normal?
Do we freak out over a future that hasn’t come to pass? Why are several states suing if this is a non-issue, or is this just a lot of political grandstanding?
So yeah, people want to become informed about it, but so many sources seem biased in one direction or another and it’s hard to tell what’s a fact that should be concerning, what’s a possibility that should be concerning, and what’s just fear mongering white noise.
