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"Trump’s F.C.C. Pick Quickly Targets Net Neutrality Rules"
New York Times.
"What Reporters Need to Know About Covering
Net Neutrality" Nieman Reports.
Net neutrality is one of the founding principles of the Internet. We take it for granted that all web traffic is treated equally by our service providers and distributed to us at the same speed.
With a few exceptions, providers do not discriminate between classical music streams, silly cat videos, Amazon shopping sprees, off-colour Facebook rants or high-stakes business emails. This open model has allowed the Internet to transform almost every aspect of human life through instant communication and the free association of people and ideas.
As a result of this transformation, net neutrality has had a particularly profound effect upon online journalism. The established media's stranglehold on the news was broken by a surge of independent outlets with niche interests; these groundbreaking organizations flourished under the web's worldwide range and lower operating costs. Furthermore, millions of individual voices emerged to report breaking stories from their daily lives and a new era of social media dawned in place of the stagnant monopolies.
Net neutrality, however, is now under serious threat from US President Donald Trump. The combative Republican is a staunch opponent of the Obama-era legislation that strengthened net neutrality and reclassified broadband internet as an essential public utility like electricity.
Ajit Pai, Trump's new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is a former lawyer for the telecommunications empire Verizon. Under Pai's watch, the FCC is taking steps to dismantle the old system to please large corporations and anti-government politicians. By gutting the regulations that preserved the Internet as an open network, Trump's administration could effectively end net neutrality and fundamentally change how the Internet works.
While net neutrality can be complicated to explain, the coming attack against it will hurt competitiveness and stifle innovation on an international scale. Startups, non-profits and private citizens in North America currently enjoy a fairly level playing field where they have affordable access to high quality Internet services.
There are many ways the FCC could make changes to the Internet's existing neutral structure that would be against the public's best interest. For example, they could allow the creation of "fast lanes" where users pay a high price to speedily access content and keep inferior "slow lanes" for average users.
This network "throttling" would be an attempt to capitalize on the public's insatiable demand for streaming sites like Netflix and Youtube that burn up large amounts of bandwidth - services that decimated telecom cash cows like cable television.
Efforts to throttle audio and visual streams could also have huge implications for online news organizations that have created vast amounts of multimedia content to attract a wide digital audience. If average users are unable to consume said content at a steady rate, site traffic and revenues could theoretically plunge.
This action alone is enough to jeopardize the health of countless media companies; business failures or further industry consolidation are the likely consequence. Both outcomes would seriously hurt the quality, diversity and accessibility of online journalism.
While the FCC is an American institution, it's obvious that the United States has played a central role in the Internet's meteoric rise in modern society. America's stance on net neutrality will affect users all over the world and Donald Trump's vendettas against his predecessor's policies could potentially derail decades of technological advancement.
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