Illustration by Hunter Garrett
Caelin Bragg
Lantern Staff
The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision last December to undo the protections of net neutrality is ultimately a slap in the face to everyone in the country.
The protections from net neutrality are as pro-consumer as policies can get. It forces internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all data equally, whether it’s browsing social media like Twitter and Facebook, streaming music from services like Spotify or Amazon, spending the night playing multiplayer games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or League of Legends, watching TV shows on Netflix or Hulu or watching something less productive and more sensual on websites that probably aren’t safe. It shouldn’t be up to ISPs to decide how their customers should use their internet.
A lot of ISPs say they will continue to enforce net neutrality on their own even after the vote, but these same ISPs were the ones pushing so hard for net neutrality to go away. Why would they be fighting so hard to get rid of something officially, only to turn around and do it unofficially? I honestly put zero trust in any ISP to keep up their end of the bargain without oversight.
While it’s unlikely that ISPs will start to block certain websites entirely, I don’t see the argument for having rules that even allow that to be a possibility. If phone companies suddenly had the ability to decide whether a person could call someone or not, whether they ever do anything with that or not, I don’t imagine most people would feel entirely comfortable with that notion.
Even if net neutrality is no longer enforced, many argue that the free market will sort itself out by consumers switching off of providers that start using their newfound abilities, but where are these other providers to switch to? If I want high-speed, wired internet, I have only one option and that’s Cox. I’ve already been unhappy with Cox for many, many years, and I have been waiting for competition to sprout up, but that continues to be a pipe dream, one that I see continuing even after net neutrality is fully gone.
It doesn’t help that the vote by the FCC was pushed through after the sleaziest attempt to hear the opinions of the public. There was nothing in place to try and curb fraudulent comments from both sides, leading the FCC to mostly ignore it entirely. It made me feel like I had no voice in the matter, a matter that could drastically affect my, and many others in the country’s, lives, something I didn’t feel before the current administration placed Ajit Pai as chairman of the FCC.
A free and open internet should not be something that has to be fought for time and time again. I can’t recall how many times net neutrality has been under attack over the last two decades, but this is the first time that the outcome seems to be a loss for all of us. I don’t see how, in any way, this vote helps consumers, it only serves to make ISPs more powerful and limit the freedom of Americans.