What Is Net Neutrality Law?

The second video “Moyers & Company: Is Net Neutrality Dead?” is about a debate regarding net neutrality, which is the right to communicate freely online, keeping the major internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast from increasing costs for costumers to not slow down or block any content they want to use, also called price discrimination, a service offered at different prices by the same provider in different markets. As there are only few internet providers, barriers are set by limiting the area where some of them are allowed to supply their services to, limiting competition and increasing costs for consumers.

Net Neutrality basically gives people the right to be on an open internet. Earlier this year, the FCC adopted net neutrality rules. However, the lawsuit was due to the fact that the US Telecom Association thought they did it by violating administrative law. During the court session, it was debated that the FCC violated the providers first amendment rights about deciding what content to distribute. The FCC attorneys

To encapsulate thursdays decision; The FCC decided that ISPs(internet service providers), needed not, have rules keeping them from blocking or changing the speed of online content, or prioritizing their providers internet content. The FCC made this move to veer away from the act of regulating the internet, according to CNN “In the absence of a firm ban on these actions, providers will be required to publicly disclose any instance of blocking, throttling or paid prioritization. It will then be evaluated based on whether or not the activity is anti-competitive.”(Fiegerman, 2017). The Federal Communications Commission also decided to move internet protection issues to The Federal Trade Commission.

Paul Anderson Mrs. Decker English IV 4 March 2018 Net Neutrality Internet is a new and constantly changing environment. In such a growing place, there needs to be regulations.

Net neutrality is a set of rules designed to make Internet service providers treat all web traffic the same, no matter the source. Its defenders say these regulations are at the heart of the idea that the Internet without interference by broadband providers.

the August of 2005, the F.C.C. adopted a very important policy statement regarding net neutrality. This policy statement protects several things that are essential to anyone who frequently uses the Internet. It gives consumers the freedom to access any content and to use any application within the law. In early December, 2017, the F.C.C. voted to repeal it. However, just over half of the US states have made attempts to pass legislation that reinforces net neutrality. Net Neutrality protects American “internet freedom”, ensuring that the people can make full use of the internet and prevents Internet Service Providers from having too much control.

Federal Communications Commission, otherwise known as the FCC, voted two-to-one in May of 2017, to begin the tearing down of the net neutrality law (Rushe), that which protected individuals from companies that purposefully slowed down service lanes so as to regulate what was being broadcasted across computers. Chief internet official Ajit Pai at the FCC stated that he believed that the dismantling of the net neutrality laws could pave the way for a more competitive marketplace, that which would “lift ‘heavy-handed’ internet regulations that overly restricted internet providers” (White). The repealing of net neutrality seems to mainly garner approval from big companies, such as Verizon, and more recently, Comcast, companies that would do well by the repealing of such a law. With net neutrality gone companies such as those listed above would be able to, legally, regulate and control what people saw on the internet by slowing down or speeding up lanes depending on the affiliation the company has with that specific website (Finley). However, even with Title II in effect, some companies have found a way to circumvent those rules in order to ‘play favorites’ as it were. For instance, when AT&T customers access the Direct TV’s streaming service they may find that the data extrapolated from the service used did not count towards their current data limit’s (Finley). It is also believed that with no regulations in place regarding net neutrality, companies have the potential of becoming dictators and blocking

On December 14th, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote to replace current rules enforcing net neutrality. Nothing short of an extinction-level event will prevent it. But before we’re resigned to fate, know that while the battle for net neutrality at the FCC may have been lost, the war isn’t even close to being over which sounds kinda scary. Really, the net neutrality fight is simply migrating to a different theater, namely, The US Courts of Appeals. And excluding the possibility of a Supreme Court challenge, the outcome could very well drag on for another year and a half or more.

Content and internet service providers spoke out as well, increasing the need for some kind of legislation. Various forms of the original guiding principles were proposed as net neutrality legislation; however none of them were passed. Due to the growth of the debate and increasing numbers of complaints, the FCC has proposed their latest set of guidelines called, “preserving the open internet”, to be voted on as net neutrality legislation. Content providers such as Amazon.com, Disney, Facebook, eBay, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, and voice over internet protocol company’s like Vonage and Skype, as well as educational or public interest groups such as Educause, Internet2, ACE, Regional Optical Networks, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are all in favor of passing the “preserving the open internet” legislation. Then there are those against “preserving the open internet” legislation such as telecommunications and cable companies like AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Charter Communications, and hardware manufacturers such as Cisco, Nortel, and VeriSign (Greenfield, 2006).

Throughout the last decade, the idea of Net Neutrality has been the topic of many debates. Net Neutrality is the idea that Internet service providers should not be allowed to block their users from any content regardless of its source. The Debate is still continuing in 2017 with the F.C.C planning to repeal Net Neutrality and allow internet providers to completely regulate what their users can see and charge the users extra for “luxuries” such as social media, messaging, email, and music. There are two sides of this argument, one side believes that Net Neutrality should be taken away, while others believe that it is unfair for the Internet providers to have the right to take away the access to any content. Internet providers should not be allowed to control what content one can view when surfing the internet.

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web brought upon a medium of communication with a range of opportunities for the world. However, this medium is, in due course, subject to the control of a few major companies. The enigma of information flow is the central concern of net neutrality. Consumers, competition and network owners would benefit directly from the regulation of network neutrality because it would provide a positive impact to those parties as well as provide equality.

Yet at the same time, these two sets of companies compete for customers, creating a glaring conflict of interest. Whilst these issues seemed to be resolved by the middle of the twentieth century, the advent of the internet introduced a whole new set of problems. The term net neutrality, first coined by Tim Wu, Professor of the Columbia University Law School in 2003, came to represent a question that had long been perceived as being of relatively little concern – is unfettered access to the internet a right, or a privilege? (Cheng and Bandyopadhay 2011: 60) (Greenstein 2007: 61, 85) The debate around internet regulation and net neutrality first gained traction in 2002, when the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) controversially ruled that broadband internet was to be classed as an information service rather as a telecommunications service, and thus made it exempt from a considerable range of content and conduct regulations that it would otherwise have been subject to. For those Americans, as exemplified by organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who saw the internet as a space of uninhibited free expression that needed to be protected from the influence of corporate meddling, this decision was very frustrating. As promoted by Wu and others, net neutrality came to represent the belief that ‘internet data packets should move nondiscriminatorily’ – that is, the data (‘packets’ essentially being a technical

In an article by The White House, “Simply put: no service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane’ because it does not pay a fee” (The White House). In simpler terms, without network neutrality, good services couldn’t deliver quick service to their customers, just because network providers won’t let them without paying a fee. An article by Rey Lin says “This principle implies that an information network such as the internet is most efficient and useful when it is less focused on a particular audience and instead attentive to multiple users” . This explains that all types of services and media should be embraced on the internet, and not just those that network owners agree with, or are paid to agree with. “we cannot allow Internet service providers (ISP’s) to restrict best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas” (The White House). I believe this quote sums it up perfectly, allowing ISP’s to decide which services are successful and not successful is placing power in their hands that should be in the hands of the consumers using the services. Allowing ISP’s to decide which services are successful on the internet would ultimately hurt the consumer by not allowing them to decide which services they want to

Many Americans today rely on the Internet for two main reasons: information and connectivity. Some may consider it as the biggest library available because of the endless information it can provide. It further enhanced people’s knowledge of what’s going on all around the globe and has been proved to be a very powerful tool that is available for anyone to use. Communication improved not just here in the United States of America, but also in other countries thanks to social media. Despite of all this, there is still an evident problem for American citizens when it comes to Internet Regulation. There’s an apparent government intervention when it comes to regulating the Internet. Under net neutrality, companies shouldn’t restrict what and how

In February 2015, a set of rules called the net neutrality rules came into effect by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) called Title II. These were the strongest net neutrality they could pass, completely blocking numerous cable and phone companies such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc., from discriminating for/against any site on the internet. Meaning they are not allowed to make any site on the internet run faster or slower, or completely block the site in general.They also prohibited from charging anyone any sort of extra fee for using certain sites. These actions were acclaimed by internet users all over the country as the integrity of the world wide web had stayed in tact. However, thanks to AJit Pai, President Donald Trump’s FCC chairman, net neutrality may