Bear with me here: the complex implications of Tuesday’s federal appeals court ruling against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding net neutrality are critically important to us — the Internet-addicted populace. If you get your TV-fix from Hulu, download your favorite music through torrents, or talk to friends on study abroad over Skype, the blow dealt to net neutrality by this verdict should incite you to rise up and seize your virtual pitchforks (by that I mean blog about it angrily). You may wonder why you should care about something you’ve probably heard very little about before. Let me explain.
Net neutrality is the idea that all web traffic is created equal, and therefore broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) should not be allowed to prioritize access to certain websites over others. It basically prohibits preferencial treatment, so doing away with net neutrality would allow ISPs to charge sites that generate large amounts of traffic or slow traffic to websites that compete with their commercial interests. For example, not that we’d ever (have the money to) do this, but in the absence of net neutrality NYU Local could theoretically cut a deal with an ISP for it to choke traffic to nyunews.com so that more people would resort to reading nyulocal.com, whose sexy pages would load so much faster.
In 2008, the FCC reprimanded Comcast for secretly “throttling” peer-to-peer traffic to BitTorrent, which Comcast insisted it did only as a means of managing peak-congestion. Comcast sued the FCC, claiming that the FCC lacks the authority to require ISPs to respect net neutrality.
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