Dem
47
GOP
53
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overruled the FCC and declared that the FCC does not have the authority to impose net neutrality on Internet Service providers. Joe Biden had considered this one of his crowning achievements. It is exceedingly unlikely that Donald Trump will appeal this decision to the Supreme Court since he opposes most government regulations on private companies, especially on big quasi-monopolies.
The ruling said that Internet providers were not just big dumb pipes and thus could be regulated the same way telephone companies can be regulated. By law, telephone companies must produce a menu of services and prices and sell their services to anyone willing to pay their set price for it. Congress could explicitly give the FCC power to regulate Internet providers, but Republicans oppose that, so it is not going to happen anytime soon.
Does this matter? In the immortal words of Sarah Palin "You betcha." How about a couple of examples? Amazon Prime competes with other streaming services, including Netflix, Disney+, and others. One way for Amazon to compete is to produce better content than the other guys, but that would lead to an ongoing battle that could get expensive. Another way would be for Jeff Bezos to go to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and the other phone companies and offer a deal: I will pay you $[X] million a year if you give Amazon Prime super good performance and simultaneously slow down Netflix, Disney+, and other competitors. With net neutrality, it would be illegal for the telcos to do that. Now it is legal, so they would probably respond to Bezos with: "What's X?" They know they would lose customers if they effectively shutdown Netflix and Disney+, but if X is big enough, the bean counters at the telcos might tell the CEOs: "Do it!" Sure, Netflix would sue, but a business decision to favor one company over another is legal, just as they can decide to buy their routers from Juniper rather than Cisco.
The same issue applies to e-commerce. Suppose Walmart offers the telcos $[Y] million to slow down target.com so people get very frustrated with it and stop shopping there online. For the right price, they might be interested. After all, doing that is now legal.
We are a political site, so how about a political example? Many people get their television over the Internet. Satellite dishes and rabbit ears aren't very common. Suppose Rupert Murdoch goes to the telcos and asks: "How much do I have to pay you to reduce MSNBC and CNN to 56 kbps and give all their other bandwidth to Fox?" They might give him a number and he might accept it. Then the pesky MSNBC and CNN go away. Once on a roll, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal might then ask the telcos how much it would cost to throttle The New York Times and the Washington Post into uselessness. Again, they could name a number and the Journal might accept the deal. Until last week, that would be completely illegal. Now it is just companies making business decisions.
These are just a few examples. Due to the enormous impact of the Internet on just about everything, the possibility of deep-pocketed companies blocking their competition by paying the telcos to cut off their Internet access is now simply a business decision. (V)