If you are not a technologist please just hang on a second because this is important for you too. So what is net neutrality in a nut shell? It’s making sure that all users have an open and consistent access to resources on the internet. The internet is essentially just a platform that delivers data to your computer. Your ISP ( cable company, telco) controls the flow of data to your house because they sit directly between you and the internet.

What net neutrality is proposing is that we make sure that all resources on the internet are treated equally so that nothing is given precedence over anything else. This is really important for start ups and small businesses.

To draw an analogy what would happen if a law was passed allowing power companies to set special prices for certain devices. So a Samsung fridge what cost less per kilowatt hour to run than a GE or something. This would be terrible because it skews the market unfairly. However this is the sort of thing that would happen if net neutrality is lost.

Some of the proposals in the past:

Some of the things that have already either have been tried or proposed are

Internet Fast Lanes: Essentially this means that some resources would be faster to access than others. For instance google search would return quicker and would load faster than other search providers.

Data Content throttling: This is where an ISP will monitor their users and if they see someone streaming video or using other high bandwidth applications they will downgrade their connection to a slower connection. The reasoning is that supposedly they say they are trying to save on bandwidth. The actual reasoning is terrible and convoluted I won’t go into it here but you could read this : FCC can’t stop throttling

Internet Channels: There has been some discussion in the past and proposals to set up the internet in such a way where there would be certain premium websites you would have to subscribe to (almost like cable television channels) and then other sites would just be at a degraded bandwidth.

The current issue:

The problem right now is with the FCC reclassifying the internet as an information service rather than a telecommunication service. The FCC wrote a great article so I will let them tell the story. DEAR FCC: WE SEE THROUGH YOUR PLAN TO ROLL BACK REAL NET NEUTRALITY

They also created a site to contact the FCC about your concerns. I recommend you use it.

Dear FCC