Net neutrality is something about which you may not know. But it is of utmost importance in the age of the internet. In this blog post, I will explain to you what net neutrality is, why it is so important, and ways that it is being jeopardized.  

First of all, what is net neutrality? Net neutrality is a law that prohibits internet service providers such as Verizon and Jio from discriminating on internet traffic. This essentially means that they have to treat all internet traffic equally. They can’t deliberately slow down some traffic or speed up other traffic. For example, if Amazon bribed Verizon into slowing down the traffic from all of the other online shops, this would be illegal and they would be punished. Conversely, if Verizon slowed down the traffic from Amazon and tried to blackmail them into paying money, Amazon could take Verizon to court and win easily. 

Why is this important to the average consumer like you and me? This is important because the user experience of some sites could deteriorate quite a lot if the service providers try anything like that. For example, back in December of 2013 people who used Comcast experienced a sharp drop in quality of the streaming from Netflix. The video quality was about half as good as before, and the videos were buffering much more than before. Users of Netflix and Comcast suffered from this for two months before Netflix and Comcast struck a deal. This is luckily not that common, but imagine what would happen if they tried to do something like this to something much more popular like YouTube or Google. Things like this only will make the internet worse for everyone as it undermines the fact that the internet was made for people to communicate and view content as they wish, consumers shouldn’t have to suffer like this just because their internet service provider(which they already pay for) wants even more money. Not to mention the fact that this by principle ruins the purpose of the internet(to freely communicate). 

How is net neutrality be being jeopardized? This is mainly in the US, but the US has a large influence over the rest of the world and is the third-largest consumer of the internet behind India and China. In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission(FCC). This is the Commission that enforces and passes laws that regulates everything internet-related in the US. He is firmly anti-net-neutrality and rolled back a lot of the regulations that were created to ensure net-neutrality.   As of right now, the FCC no longer enforces this law and it is up to the individual states to do so. To make this even worse, many countries follow the US a lot in these situations, so this could really affect many, many people.

I hope you have a good understanding of this issue now.