i was perusing through Cecil’s archives and found this :
and I remember that was a big thing until dump got elected and it sort of was put on the back burner … was it ever resolved ?
The FCC, under commissioner Ajit Pai, gave in to the demands of telecom companies and basically eliminated net neutrality. However, courts have determined that individual states can still adopt regulations to prevent ISPs from throttling traffic. Pai is gone now, and his replacements are looking at ways to undo the damage.
Moderator Note
No political pot-shots in GQ, please.
President Biden has issued an executive order that restores net neutrality to some extent.
I am not clear on how far he can go on his own with an executive order but the administration wants to undo the mess Ajit Pai made.
More info:
Broadband providers did not jump on the change in net neutrality rules in 2017 as quickly as one might have thought. The repeal did not go into effect until June 2018, and there was a lengthy appeals process that did not resolve until February 2020 (with an appeals court upholding the repeal). But they have been exploring the new territory since, primarily in the form of partnerships and premium services. This has been especially true of cellular carriers, which have introduced a bevy of bundled services that don’t count data against caps for use of certain services (like YouTube or Netflix) or have throttled competitor’s products (as Sprint was caught doing to Skype by a study conducted in 2019). – SOURCE
Note that the ISPs did not jump in and make the changes, partly because of the state laws and partly because they suspected the decision would be retracted. There were big questions as to the legitimacy of the comments in favor of ending it, too.
What are the limits of what a president can do with an executive order? Since Ajit Pai, as head of the FCC, an executive department, did stuff, can’t the president totally change or undo it? (If Congress had passed a law and Trump had signed it, that would be different, and harder to override with an executive order.)