The day you didn’t want to come has arrived.
As of Tuesday, June 11th, net neutrality regulations have ended. As such, the Open Internet Order is no longer in effect, opening the door for internet service providers to control access to online content in the United States as they see fit.
The Open Internet Order was enacted by the FCC during President Obama’s administration under then-director Tom Wheeler. The FCC’s rules protected the spirit of net neutrality by blocking ISPs from throttling bandwidth for any content, or preventing any content from reaching end users.
Internet Service Providers had argued that the Open Internet Order regulations weren’t necessary given that they already respected net neutrality. End users, however, didn’t see it that way thanks to Comcast and Verizon pushing Netflix into paying extra money to get streaming movies to customers.
Given that case, Netflix users noted the quality of their streaming content degraded as Comcast and Verizon choked off the bandwidth for the streams. In some cases, movies would stutter and stall, or drop out completely. Once Netflix agreed to the ISP payment terms, movie streaming worked reliably again.
Other Internet Service Providers, such as AT&T, had been accused of violating the idea of net neutrality by blocking the iPhone Skype app on its cellular network several years ago.
The United States Senate passed a bill working to protect net neutrality, though the legislation is stalled in the House of Representatives. Even if the bill does eventually make it to the White House, the likelihood that President Trump will sign it into law is essentially zero.
Don’t expect to see any major changes as to how your Internet Service Provider handles traffic and significant changes may not be visible for several months as companies watch to see what happens with this new legislation.
Internet Service Providers may also wait to see what happens or changes as of the mid-term elections in November. The companies will also need to figure out how to deal with individual states taking action to protect net neutrality.
So far, two states have passed pro-net neutrality legislation, more than 30 others have legislation or executive orders on the way.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via The Mac Observer