Well, my conservative readers, they went and did it. Might be time to shiver in your shoes.
Net neutrality, the set of rules requiring internet service providers to treat all traffic as equal, is dead.
The five members of the Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday 3-2 along party lines to scrap Obama-era net neutrality rules, returning to a “light touch” approach and ending what Chairman Ajit Pai has called the federal government’s “micromanaging” of the internet. …
“Prior to 2015, before these regulations were imposed, we had a free and open internet,” Pai told NBC News. “That is the future as well under a light touch, market-based approach. Consumers benefit, entrepreneurs benefit. Everybody in the internet economy is better off with a market based approach.” [NBC News]
The chairman appears to be quite naive. To my eye, this means every ISP is now a target of political activists, not only for influence, but for marching your favorite ideological nutcase – liberal and conservative – up the corporate ladder until they’re in a position to control their portion of the Internet.
Fortunately, I suspect this is easy enough to reverse if consumer-regressive consequences do, in fact, occur.
