In an ideal world, the Internet is a place where all information is made accessible to all people. Anything a person might be thinking about can be found online, like Bernie Sanders inauguration memes. Net neutrality was established as a means to keep Internet Service Providers from direct traffic to specific websites, censoring content, or gatekeeping access of certain customers. This issue has been contentious at both the Federal and State level in the United States.
After the Federal Government repealed laws in place to protect net neutrality in 2018, the State of California passed its own net neutrality laws. In response, the Trump Administration and several cable industry trade groups filed a lawsuit to block California’s enforcement of the laws. The case has been at a stalemate since 2018, but a recent development could lead to change.
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California enacted their own laws to keep the Internet neutral in the state, but the Federal Government’s lawsuit against the state left the laws in limbo, until now. The Biden Administration has announced that they are withdrawing from the lawsuit, leaving just the cable industry groups to fight the state. This is seen as a likely first step towards restoring net neutrality laws nationwide. The Internet began as an equal access space, and net neutrality keeps ISPs from monopolizing segments of the net, something large companies sometimes try to do, like Facebook’s alleged attempts to block Oculus competition.
This certainly isn’t the first time an Internet-based or focused company has fought with a federal government. Recently, Google has been fighting with Australia over changes to revenue streams from news feeds. The government is proposing that a fair share of the revenue should go to the media companies that produce the news, in order to pay journalists and staff. Google is threatening to remove its search engine from Australia all together in response.
Net neutrality is seen as an inconvenience for cable & internet providers as these companies would like to control the content that customers are able to access in order to boost earnings. For example, Comcast is the parent company of both NBC and Xfinity. NBC’s streaming service Peacock just added the WWE to its lineup of programming. Without net neutrality, Comcast can attempt to funnel Xfinity customers towards its Peacock streaming service, while throttling download speeds on a competing streaming service, like Paramount+, making it seem inferior.
These massive companies can be seen as trying to bully governments into letting them reap larger and larger profits. News that the Biden Administration is pulling back from this lawsuit in California is likely a sign of good things to come for internet users across the United States.
Source: Twitter
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