This past Wednesday, Trump-appointed chair to the FCC Ajit Pai dropped a bombshell announcement that could have dire consequences for the open internet. Pai has been a staunch opponent of Net Neutrality, and his proposed plan from a recent speech in Washington is the latest in a series of attacks on internet protections.
What is this "Net Neutrality" thing?
There are a lot of misconceptions about what Net Neutrality is. Basically it's the idea that Internet Service Providers, or ISP's (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc.) should treat all content on the internet equally. So, no slowing down/blocking websites, or no speeding up certain content. Now why would they do that?
Imagine that some rich guy owns a busy toll road. Everyone pays a small fee to drive on it, including the local delivery company. Now say that rich dude decides to open his own delivery service, then raises the price of the toll or even blocks the path for the competing company. All the while, his delivery trucks get to drive free. That just creates unfair competition.
This kind of thing has happened before, too. In 2014, Comcast throttled traffic to Netflix until they paid the ISP to restore to full speed. And in 2012, AT&T blocked FaceTime, a competitor to its own voice services. It's these dick moves that are exactly the thing Net Neutrality rules are in place to prevent.
So, what did the Trump Administration do?
Ajit Pai has been going after net neutrality principles since day one as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Not long after he took the position, he dropped several ongoing investigations into ISP's finding loopholes in the current regulations.
Now, he's just announced a plan that would effectively change the classification of these internet providers, making it so that the neutrality rules won't apply to them. This comes hot on the heels of a Republican congress that just voted to allow ISP's to collect your web-browsing data, without any form of consent.
How will this affect me?
It can be hard to figure how these things will affect your average person. Many of the things that violate net neutrality are spun as good for the consumer, like internet "fast lanes" for certain content. But in the end, it limits innovation. Small companies and websites could basically be forced to pay "ransom" for decent speeds, and these costs could trickle down to you, too. What if you have to pay extra to access certain websites, or if Verizon decided to slow down Netflix in order to promote their own crappy knockoff?
In the end, this all comes down to how Congress will act, and how far the ISP's are willing to go if they are left unchecked. But if the Trump administration is already unpopular among millennials and younger generations, then screwing up the internet is sure as hell not going to help.
