If you are having a hard time wrapping your head around it, you aren’t alone. It seems we get asked nearly every day if Net Nutrality matters, and what the potential ramifications are if the FCC reverses this policy. It is a bit of a challenge to explain in a way that makes sense to the average person, because most people have the belief that if they are paying for a connection of a certain speed, you are getting that speed. That is true, but only sort of. While you are maybe paying for a 100Mb internet connection, and are getting that speed from the providers network, that doesn’t mean you are getting that performance when you connect to another providers network via your provider.
This was illustrated this week on a different platform by the actions of Google, who has made the decision to prevent viewing of YouTube content on Amazon Fire TV, and Echo Show devices beginning Jan 1 2018, because Amazon does not allow sales of Google devices such as the Google Home, which is a direct competitor with the Amazon Echo (Alexa).
Today, the FCC currently requires that the Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) ensure that the their connections to other ISP’s are as good as possible using commercially reasonable efforts, and that there is no favoritism in what connects where. That is why you can watch Netflix over your cable modem connection, and it all works relatively well. If net neutrality ends, this will not necessarily be the case any longer. Since your Cable provider has a streaming service similar to Netflix, if they want to drive you to use their streaming service instead of Netflix, they can simply give Netflix traffic such a low priority, (or no priority) that is effectively unusable, thus “forcing” you to use their service which will work great since their own content has high priority. Another Example is that if you get your internet connection from a local Phone company such as AT&T or Frontier Communication, then choose to use VOIP phones for your business from a competing provider, the ISP can simply make those calls a low priority, which results in bad call quality in an effort to force you back to their competing service which just happens to work perfectly.
At the end of the day, Net Neutrality boils down to the idea that the provider of your internet connection shouldn’t be able to control how you use that connection, nor should they be able to steer you to its preferred content provider or service.
