Ajit Pai is going to get rid of net neutrality. The short explanation is to expect to either pay more to your ISP for “content packages” or expect to pay more to the content providers since their costs will increase due to this. Or expect more to go out of business. The next Netflix may just die on the vine.
Basically, expect slower connections to bandwidth intensive sites that don’t have the money to pay your ISP for that. Netflix has stated they are positioned and cash rich enough to not be materially impacted, but other video or image providers may have problems.
You probably thought “I am paying my ISP for that access, and that website pays their ISP for that access. Why is my ISP implementing an artificial throttle on my connection so I see shitty, grainy video? Without that it would work fine and it always has in the past.”
It’s just about profit for investors of the telecom providers. Your ISP will now have the legal capability to say “we’ll slow down this specific site’s traffic unless you pay us more money. Or that site you are trying to access pays us more money. Basically, we expect more money and are holding your access to this content hostage.”
It’s what was happening to Netflix and why they paid huge money to the ISPs to peer directly with them or accept their equipment into their data centers.
This 100% is terrible for consumers. It won’t improve the networks in any material way either. So, if you are an investor in telecommunication service providers, get excited. This one is for you.
There are a ton of other facets of this, but I think the access to websites is the one that will piss people off the most. The thing that makes it infuriating is people will blame the site instead of their ISP.
“Everything else works, why is this one site slow? It must be the site.”
Unfortunately, that’s wrong. Your ISP is just throttling that traffic and telling the content provider to pay them to allow them to pass through the network.
I have Google Fiber coming, so I am not particularly worried about this impacting me. I definitely would not be on AT&T, Frontier, Verizon, Comcast, or Charter. They will almost certainly be running these schemes.
What a magical world we live in. This has all happened already, so anyone saying this is speculation isn’t looking at history. Which is hilarious, since that history wasn’t even completed two years ago.