Tech industry says Net Neutrality should remain unchanged

Apr 12, 2017 23:35 GMT  ·  By

Tech giants are teaming up to once more fight for net neutrality, which makes us believe we're back to 2014 or 2015. 

The Internet Association, which is a lobby group representing companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and many others, met with Ajit Pai, the new FCC chairman, to tell him net neutrality rules are great just the way they are.

This meeting comes as rumors regarding FCC's plans for net neutrality intensified over the past few weeks, indicating that they're planning to roll back rules protecting net neutrality. Of course, that's not exactly a big surprise since Ajit Pai had expressed opposition to net neutrality since he was only just a member of the FCC, back during the Obama administration.

"The internet industry is uniform in its belief that net neutrality preserves the consumer experience, competition, and innovation online. In other words, existing net neutrality rules should be enforced and kept intact," the meeting summary reads, explaining the position the tech industry has on the matter.

New rules are no good

The latest news on FCC's plans for net neutrality indicate an intention to eliminate the Commission's control over ISPs in order to make neutrality voluntary. The base idea is that there's so much competition among ISPs that they'll just respect the rules on their own volition. In reality, that can't be farther from the truth in most areas across the United States where many citizens have only one option when it comes to choosing an ISP.

What tech companies want is for things to stay the way they are. Namely, ISPs should not be able to throttle Internet speeds, to charge heavy users more or to try to block people from using services promoted by competitors, for instance. One of the big examples given back when the fight for net neutrality was on, in 2014, was that some ISPs would purposfully "strangle" the highways taking users to services like Netflix, in order to favor competitor streaming services as Hulu.