The Issue Of Net Neutrality

There has been no previous issue overseen by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that has ever come close to provoking as much attention as the FCC’s 2014 Open Internet Rulemaking (Mehta, 2015). “Net Neutrality”, the term which prohibits the discrimination of Internet data by the telephone and cable companies based on type of content, source of content, device on which it is accessed etc. is wrangling around for quite some time now. It is only after more than a decade of rigorous discussions, lawsuits and power changes at the FCC that a decision was made in favor of net neutrality on February 26, 2015.

The topic of “Net Neutrality,” has been hot subject in the tech industry since the early parts of the Twenty-First Century. This paper

However, the video-calling app doesn’t work. AT&T has blocked the app and suggested to subscribe to a more expensive text-and-voice plan if you wanted to use FaceTime app. This is an example of violating net neutrality. This incident occurred in 2012. AT&T started to block traffic from certain applications to promote its own products and increase profits. Situation like this are very common which is why FCC has established Net Neutrality rules to prevent companies and people from manipulating data.

So, what is Net Neutrality? “Net neutrality is an equal playing field for everyone. It is the idea that any network traffic such as movies, mp3, videos, pictures can move from one place to any other place without discrimination, halting, or slowing down transfer of data” (Madrigal, 2014). However, the idea of Net Neutrality wasn’t always a welcoming idea to some people. It has a long history of how Net Neutrality got to where it is

They started to ask other cable networks if they could use their services for broadband networks. Both The Communications Act of 1934 and The Telecommunications Act of 1996 laid the foundation for net neutrality. These reclassified broadband Internet as a “common carrier” giving it the ability to set rules on how ISPs handle their service (Hardawar, 2015). This sparked the long going debate about net neutrality and whether broadband networks should be treated as a public utility or not. Tim Wu, the father of net neutrality, coined the term “net neutrality” defining that Internet service providers should treat all internet traffic equally (Chan, 2015). This was the stepping stone to net neutrality