Say goodbye to "Net Neutrality"

The Chair of the Federal Communications Commission - Ajit Pai - has today revealed his plans to eliminate the doctrine of "net neutrality". 

"Net neutrality" refers to a set of Obama-era regulations intended to assure that Internet service providers (ISPs) treat all Internet traffic on their networks equally.  Those regulations would prevent an ISP from giving preference to Internet traffic to selected sites at the expense of traffic bound for other sites.  For example, the doctrine would prohibit an ISP from assuring faster performance for traffic bound to one of its own content sites or from entering into pay-for-play agreements with content provides for preferred treatment of its Internet traffic.

Commissioner Pai's proposed changes are expected to be brought to the full FCC for a vote at their 12/14 meeting and are expected to be approved on a party-line vote.  Under the new regulations, ISPs such as Comcast or AT&T would be allowed to deliberately slow down Internet traffic to sites associated with their competitors, speedup Internet traffic to their own sites or to sites which might have agreed to pay the ISP for faster Internet performance.  In future, therefore, your ISP will determine which Internet sites, services or applications will work for you and which will not. ISPs will be required to be "transparent," meaning that they will have to reveal when they have blocked or throttled traffic.