The New Year ushers in a new regiment of near self-regulation of the internet. Away with Net Neutrality and welcome Net Bias.
A lot has been said about the implications of rolling back the Obama era “Net Neutrality” rules. While many ISP’s have pledged a big NO to Net Biased, there is no law which stops them from changing their minds in the future.
If the past is any indication, ISPs will eventually engage in bandwidth (BW) throttling. Heck, Tier 1 ISPs such as Comcast could decide to limit the speed of users visiting Facebook or Twitter. Why not? If you were Comcast, sending potential advertiser and publishers, that eventually translate to millions of dollars in profit for these Social Networks and not deriving any direct income from their advertising revenue, your next course of action is obvious.
The temptation is much too great to resist, especially when you hold all the aces.
In the crossfire, as usual, are the consumers. First off, the Government currently does not have the tools to monitor the bandwidth usage and availability for every user. ISPs will undoubtedly be reluctant to release such information as well.
The burden falls on the consumer to device a means of monitoring these ISPs. The probability of success for such a venture is near zero.
