Pros And Cons Of Net Neutrality

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Net Neutrality is a politically charged topic in the United States, and has been for several years now. Both sides of the issue are attempting to influence the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC), which theoretically has the power to decide the matter. During the Obama administration, the FCC ruled that Internet Service Providers must operate in a net neutral manner. Since then, the membership of the FCC has changed and now the FCC is moving to rescind that ruling. Neither position has been tested in court. So, the ultimate position is in flux…
In a nutshell, Net Neutrality is the position that all Internet Service Providers (ISP) must be neutral in carrying packets across their network (American Civil Liberties Union, 2017). …show more content…

With the advent of high bandwidth services and increased processing power within the routers, it has become possible and practicable to discern the nature of a packet without prying into the confidentiality of the packet contents. With that ability, and the ongoing drop in prices for Internet connectivity, ISPs sough revenue from those who generate unusually large quantities of data. Prior to the advent of video streaming, this wasn’t a matter of much import. Generally ISP A and ISP B exchanged packets, and considered it to be most even over time. However, once video streaming took off, the ISPs servicing the streamers got revenue from the big companies generating the data packets, and the ISP servicing the home users still had to invest in order to support the traffic, despite not getting significant revenues in return for the investment. This was a situation ripe for exploitation. Enter the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. Under QoS rules written by the ISPs themselves, they had the right to restrict data traffic volumes in order to maintain QoS levels. Carrying that forward, some ISPs began restricting the data coming from video streamers (American Civil Liberties Union, 2017). Of course, the ISP’s own customers were unhappy about this,

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