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PirateBear  ·  2296 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Net Neutrality repealed. Quick, someone smart, explain the consequences!

    1) Now what?

Not much immediately. I would expect a lawsuit challenging the rule change to be filed by the end of the day, possibly with a request for an injunction to preserve the current rules that are in place. Even if that injunction isn't granted, there are far too many public eyes on the issue right now for Comcast et al. to do much of anything too anti-competitive. Especially seeing as they've been wiggling NN violations within the current rules for years now anyway (Comcast's usage caps).

Down the road, ISPs might start discriminating against traffic, specifically against competing content like Neflix and YouTube. ISPs purposely allowing interconnection hubs to clog up and slow Netflix was the catalyst for implementing Net Neutrality rules. Outright blocking or paywalling sites is unlikely considering the amount of public scrutiny on the issue right now.

    3) What are the foreseeable consequence through ISP's newfound unregulated consumer control and monopoly?

Site blocking is unlikely ever since it would give the rhetorical equivalent of a nuke to NN supporters. The slowing of competing services is almost a given unless the service pays the ISP. I don't think your going to see paid fast lanes on the consumer side, at least for some time. Most of this is going to take place between Google/Netflix/etc and ISPs playing interconnectivity games. Think of the games of chicken that Dish Network and cable channels play once or twice a year over rates and package composition.

    4) What else should I know about this decision?

The fight's not over. There is now going to be a big court fight over whether the landscape of US broadband has changed enough to justify such a massive rule change. The case itself is probably going to be pretty interesting when the FCC has explain why they ignored the massive fraud that took place in the commenting process, Freedom of Information Act requests, requests for information from state Attorney Generals regarding said fraud, and why the FCC ignored organic comments that were 99.7% pro-NN. The courts have already ruled in favor of net neutrality before and none of the circumstances leading up to these rulings have changed.

Then there's congress. Congress can throw out the FCC's new rule right now. They also could codify Net Neutrality into law. A lot of people have believed for a while that the whole show with the FCC was to get congress to "settle" the NN debate by codifying rules into law, but the problem with this is that congress is so flush with ISP cash that there is a real possibility that any rules they codify into law will be so filled with loopholes as to be useless. It has happened before with the FCC's original NN rules that Verizon got the courts to throw out.

This is why it is still important to contact your representatives. Best case is they actually listen and we get a decent Net Neutrality law that can't be thrown out easily and the worst is that it makes the public's voice unavoidable when they sell out the internet to large ISPs. Don't stop there either, contact anyone that will be challenging them in 2018 or 2020 and get them on the record supporting meaningful Net Neutrality rules to put pressure on the incumbent. Keep doing this every election cycle until we get meaningful rules protecting the internet. Net Neutrality is nearly universally supported by every political tribe in this day of extremely divisive politics and supporting it scores free points for nearly any representative.

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