Net Neutrality: The Perspective Of Telcos And Cable Companies

Internet Service Providers

In order for consumers to get their requested content, and for content providers to showcase them, they must be able to access the internet, which is where internet service providers come into play. Internet service providers are defined as companies that manage networks for consumers and content providers in specific regions. The implementation of the internet and packets created a standard that everyone in the industry would follow, and they trust that others would do the same to for it to work smoothly. As a result, when packets are sent through their network, they are expected to be sent in along the best possible path at the time. It can only use the minimum bandwidth between the end users, to optimize the bandwidth

The article, Net Neutrality: The Perspective of Telcos and Cable Companies, explains why ISPs prefer not to have net neutrality laws (Sinha, 2017). It states that ISPs spends up to $20 billion yearly, for maintenance and improvements to their infrastructures. The problem with the current net neutrality policies is that ISPs are not able to have a variable fee, such as other public utilities, to help recoup their investments. There is no difference in fees between a user using 100% of their bandwidth all the time and user using half. The restrictive nature of net neutrality and no promise of profits from their investments, ISPs have no incentive to innovate their platform, and create a competitive market that can benefit end users. This is worse for small ISPs as they cannot offer anything new, apart from lower rates which would eat into their diminishing profits, as many of these companies must rent internet connections from larger ISPs. Thus, in the long-term ISPs claim that net neutrality would provide a negative experience for internet users, when the same infrastructures barely improve to match the ever-improving server and storage technologies of content

Throughout the past decade, the United States’ laws regarding net neutrality have been changing, and so has the battle of keeping these policies in place. This is the result of various members of the FCC board changing, and thus the ideology of the organization changes when it came to the laws on net neutrality. Over the recent years, many internet users spoke out against the new changes proposed by the FCC, as they seemed to go against the idea of net neutrality. The FCC had failed on 2015 under the Obama administration. However, in 2017 they managed to pass changes to ‘Title II’ of the Communications Act of 1934, which left many people wondering what would happen to the internet with this breach in net neutrality. Looking at the previous laws of net neutrality in the United States will show how and why the new changes in laws