Net neutrality: Where do we go from here?

Update on March 1: Since this article was published in December of last year, the FCC has officially published its rule that repeals net neutrality in the Federal Register. Now, in the U.S. Senate, advocates of keeping net neutrality rules in place are working on fighting the repeal, which involves using the Congressional Review Act. They have until late April before some small aspects of the repeal kick in, but it remains unclear when the major changes to net neutrality would become effective, if efforts to stop the repeal fail. Meanwhile, attorneys general from over 20 states, spearheaded by Eric Schneiderman of New York, are suing to stop the repeal.



The Federal Communications Commission voted on December 14, 2017, to approve the Restoring Internet Freedom Act, which repeals the net neutrality rules that have been in place since 2015. By most reasonable accounts, this is a very bad thing.

That vote is over and the act passed, so what happens next? Will the internet be totally ruined starting tomorrow? The short answer is no, but what comes next is important.

What is net neutrality again?
In short, net neutrality classifies the internet as a utility to which people have equal and open access.

A big concern without it is the creation of different “lanes” in which content providers pay to travel. Faster delivery for your service requires a higher fee. So, if Netflix wants to deliver all that video data to its customers in super high-res, it may have to pay inflated rates to the service providers. That cost, then, gets passed on to the customers.

Smaller internet companies would see the price rise as well. So, even if your business has nothing to do with the internet, you’ll still feel the price increases if you plan to use any service that revolves around it. So, cloud backup, file sharing, team applications, and lots of other essential services could require more cash from customers.

READ MORE AT: https://www.popsci.com/net-neutrality-dead-what-happens-now#page-2

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fun facts about giraffe sex to keep you occupied while you wait for that giraffe baby

Image
A giraffe in Harpursville, NY is about to give birth. Or rather, she’s been “about” to give birth for several days now. As of the writing of this article, there are 74,000 people watching a live stream of April the giraffe just slowly wandering around her pen, flicking her tail, and stretching. It’s pretty boring. So instead of just sitting there watching a video feed, take this time to learn a little something about April and what she’s been through for the 15 freakin’ months that she’s been pregnant We’ll start at the beginning of this beautiful process: conception. Giraffes don’t have a set mating season. Instead they have an estrous cycle, which is a lot like the human menstrual cycle (but with less blood and slightly different hormones). The male giraffes don’t just mate with the ladies all the time, so they generally try to find a way to determine is the lady is fertile. How, do you ask? Pee. The answer is always pee. The boy giraffe lopes on over to the girl giraf...
Read more

Will a cryogenically-frozen corpse ever come back to life?

Image
A teenager who tragically died of cancer recently has become the latest among a tiny but growing number of people to be cryogenically frozen after death. These individuals hoped that advances in science would one day allow them to be woken up and cured of the conditions that killed them. But how likely is it that such a day will ever come? Nature has shown us that it is possible to cryopreserve animals like reptiles, amphibians, worms and insects. Nematode worms trained to recognize certain smells retain this memory after being frozen. The wood frog (Rana sylvatica) freezes into a block of ice during winter and hops around the following spring. However, in human tissue each freeze-thaw process causes significant damage. Understanding and minimizing this damage is one of the aims of cryobiology. At the cellular level, these damages are still poorly understood, but can be controlled. Each innovation in the field relies on two aspects: improving preservation during freezing...
Read more