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So... What happened with net neutrality? It's been 5 years since the FCC voted to repeal it in 2017. Net neutrality supporters promised a dystopia where small businesses and individuals are throttled by ISPs, and consumers have to pay for each website separately.
As far as I can tell... That didn't happen? Nothing happened? Did it even matter? I must be missing something, why would anyone bother trying to repeal or keep net neutrality if it doesn't make a difference? Biden apparently made an executive order in July 2021 asking the FCC to restore net neutrality, but they haven't done it. The Wikipedia article doesn't have much on what happened after 2017 other than legal developments (on the national level, there were two failed congressional laws and a failed lawsuit by Mozilla to restore net neutrality).
I'd bet it has something to do with the fact that small businesses and individuals aren't really a big enough fiscal presence on the internet to matter. Everything is big websites of big companies anyway. I remember reading/talking about how without Net Neutrality we'd just be a few giant websites and that's how it happened out anyway even with Net Neutrality in place.
Related to this, I was reading about Netflix peering deals because I was wondering how Net Neutrality dealt with that and apparently ISPs can effectively throttle large companies if they feel like it because refusing connections from another network and/or not delivering it in a timely fashion is not a violation of Net Neutrality. It only becomes about Net Neutrality when it's on their network. So, they can essentially extort money from Netflix to keep its connections to their network from being refused or connected slowly.
I think people just assumed Net Neutrality meant more than it actually does because to my tiny mind the above seems like just the kind of thing that Net Neutrality should protect against.
Under any version of Net Neutrality I've seen a network could refuse to peer with another network, but they couldn't discriminate against packets transiting in from networks they do peer with. For example, Comcast could refuse to peer with Netflix. But Netflix could pay AT&T to take the traffic, and AT&T would then deliver it to Comcast.
That's what Netflix was doing. They were paying Cogent to take the traffic and it was being delivered to Verizon but because Cogent was handling Netflix it was using more bandwidth than Verizon felt was fair so they let their ports fill up with Cogent and it slowed all Netflix content to Verizon. Netflix subsequently entered paid peering agreements with Comcast and Verizon after this to make sure their interconnections weren't disrupted. That just seems like a scam to me and not just toward Netflix. If I'm paying Verizon to provide me with internet and they don't provide Netflix simply because they're unhappy with their peering agreement with Cogent then that seems like something that shouldn't affect the customer and if it does it seems like they're not providing the thing they're supposed to be selling.
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