Matt Drance:
Put simply: the Internet we know and depend on will become something very different. The business relationship with your provider will change its focus from consumption (how many ones and zeros came over the wire) to behavior (what kind of ones and zeros). The latter is much more discriminatory and insidious.
Saying this is the endgame is rather dramatic at this point. The FCC made a long stream of mistakes culminating in its codified rules for net neutrality.
Even if the FCC had declared ISPs as a higher stage the net neutrality rules would have been struck down in court because they didn’t even bother to cite which parts of the Federal Communications Act gave them the ability to regulate it in that way in the first place. All of the judges agreed the FCC had the power to regulate them, but they must categorize them properly and do the proper work when outlining the regulatory rules.
The FCC simply can change the categorization of ISPs without Congressional action and rewrite the rules based upon that. The reason why they don’t do it now is because of the political fight that would ensue that could perceptively end in the Republicans in Congress wanting to defund the FCC because of their hatred of regulations as a whole and the fact most of them are bought by Comcast and other companies like them. However, it’s the course of action they must take because if they fold on this their power as a regulatory body fades considerably. They’re going to open themselves up for more lawsuits for more things than just net neutrality. Big leaders in the tech world who pushed for codified net neutrality rules in the first place must get behind the FCC to help and encourage them to take up the fight.
Mr. Drance outlines a possible outcome if net neutrality is gone completely, but these companies are also regulated under the FTC. Practices like charging for individual portions of the internet will be seen especially by the larger companies as an antitrust violation because it shuts down smaller competition as they have to pay for access to the bigger companies’ networks anyway. There are also privacy laws as outlined in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that would make their snooping into exactly what kind of bits we’re using a legal minefield. We effectively had net neutrality prior to codified rules, but there were more holes for companies to go through before.