This week the FCC voted to move forward with repealing and replacing net neutrality protections enacted in 2015.
The issue is public access to an open, equal internet. The laws from 2015 placed providers (the companies that pipe internet into your house or phone) in a special category of communications. The laws made it so that internet providers couldn’t increase or decrease internet speeds for whatever content, apps, or services they wanted to prioritize. Citizens feared this would lead to service providers throttling content and apps they didn’t profit from while boosting stuff they could profit from.
While recent polling suggests the majority of Americans want net neutrality, the argument was given voice by Mozilla (who makes the Firefox browser). Mozilla summarized:
“Today’s FCC vote to repeal and replace net neutrality protections brings us one step closer to a closed internet. Although it is sometimes hard to describe the ‘real’ impacts of these decisions, this one is easy: this decision leads to an internet that benefits Internet Service Providers (ISPs), not users, and erodes free speech, competition, innovation and user choice.”