Internet: Is net neutrality dead?

“The floodgates are now open for private regulation of Web traffic,” said Joshua Rivera in FastCompany.com. In a ruling handed down last week, a federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s “net neutrality” rules, which prevented Internet service providers from “restricting Web traffic in all sorts of evil ways.” Net neutrality meant that providers like Verizon couldn’t charge different prices for different kinds of data; the rate was the same for streaming a film from Netflix as for an obscure video game. The court has gutted this principle, and before long, content providers such as Netflix and Hulu—and their clients—will pay extra for high speeds, while “Web entrepreneurs and the digital startup industry” will get shunted to the slow lane.

Not necessarily, said Derek Thompson in TheAtlantic.com. While the ruling appears to hand ISPs “the right to punish companies like Netflix with extra fees for gobbling up all their bandwidth,” the battle’s not done. The court said the FCC had overstepped its authority by enforcing net neutrality rules against ISPs like Verizon that it now classifies as “information services.” An easy solution would be for the FCC to simply reclassify ISPs as “utilities, like landline phones or roads,” which would make them subject to nondiscriminatory “common carrier” rules.

What is so great about net neutrality, anyway? asked Jonathan Feldman in InformationWeek.com. “More competition, not misguided regulation, is the best way to keep the Internet open and promote innovation.” Anyone familiar with large networks knows that “the ability to prioritize or block traffic is absolutely necessary in order to serve the many when the few are acting up,” by, for instance, transferring bulky videos on peer-to-peer networks. The sooner we accept traffic management as “a necessary evil,” the sooner we’ll encourage new approaches to the Internet, and new competitors to challenge the big, stodgy service providers.

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Maybe someday, said Brian Fung in WashingtonPost.com. But the most likely effect now is that consumers will end up “paying more to access the same services they get today.” Verizon could soon start charging online gamers or video streamers extra fees, “on the grounds that you’re using more data than you otherwise might if you were simply checking email.” The winners, at least for now, may be subscribers to Verizon rival Comcast, said Elise Hu in NPR.org. In the deal it made with regulators during its recent acquisition of NBCUniversal, Comcast promised to keep playing by the FCC’s net neutrality rules through 2018. After that, who knows?