| Details: | Internet Providers Will Soon Change The Internet:
Yesterday, the FCC, lead by Republican-commissioned Ajit Pai, voted to de-classify telecom companies from Title II status, giving extraordinary powers to cable and Internet providers and ending the core principles the Internet that have been around
since the late 1980s.
Instead of companies paying for the amount of bandwidth they use, cable providers will force companies to pay based on the content they provide.
Consumers will wind up paying for the increased costs.
What is important to know:
- Your home Internet service provider (ISP)
can change the way you access sites, stream content, and use free services.
They claim that is not what they will do, yet they spent millions of dollars successfully lobbying to get this very power.
Comcast, for example, recently rescinded a promise to never alter Internet accessibility with fast-lane tolls, and is already hinting that fast-lanes (tolls levied on companies that deliver content to their users) will soon be a new source of revenue for them.
- Cost of doing business online could rise, stifling small companies and entrepreneurs.
Cable companies, can now prioritize their own Internet sites and force others to pay tolls.
- States will lose the right to pass laws protecting consumers and small businesses from monopoly-controlled price gauging and unfair competition practices.
This is one big part that goes further than a "repeal" of Net Neutrality.
- The new rules explicitly allow telecom companies to block content, telecom companies are sure to use that as leverage to collect hefty tolls from Internet content providers (news, video, etc.).
This is the other part that goes further than a "repeal" of Net Neutrality, as it effectively grants telecom corporations supreme power to reshape the methods and costs that content gets delivered to users' devices.
Telecom company business models will shift to be the gatekeepers of content, instead of communications infrastructure providers.
In simple terms, it would be like a hypothetical law that explicitly permits the US Post Office to charge additional fees for the number of words the sender wrote in holiday cards, in addition to stamps on the envelopes, except when customers buy overpriced cards from the Post Office's own store.
The (somewhat) good news:
No country has ever shifted away from Net Neutrality policies, so this is uncharted territory.
We look at past behavior by telecom corporations and industry professionals to predict what they will do to the Internet.
Probably will happen first:
- We believe streaming video services will be effected first.
Netflix, already in long fights with Verizon and Comcast, will see their service slowed or be forced to pay tolls.
Customers will see either reduced Netflix quality or higher prices.
Note that Netflix had been kicking cable TV's butt, partly by low-cost offerings, and partly by offering true 4K video streaming at 4 times the video quality over the best cable TV offerings.
- YouTube, Twitter, and similar user-submitted video sharing sites are big targets for cable companies looking to tap into the ad revenue generated by those videos.
Cable companies want to own and control content, as evidence by their recent acquisitions of NBC by Comcast and Yahoo, AOL, HuffPost and Flickr by Verizon.
- Expect to see cable companies invest in marketing campaigns, not new infrastructure, as they shift from infrastructure connection providers to gatekeepers of content.
Probably will start happening at some point:
- As companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Skype are charged tolls to reach customers,
"consumers will end up paying higher prices for essentially the same service,"
says
Roger Kay, an independent technology and market analyst.
Every site from online banks to workout apps could be hit with higher online costs, and pass those extra costs as surcharges to consumers.
- Some protocol blocking may happen at some point.
Most at-risk are person-to-person direct communications like file sharing apps, video call apps, and Internet telephony services like Google Voice and Skype.
Telecom companies, who once owned all telephone communications in the country until the Internet was invented, will again control most communications in the US and may want that source of revenue back.
- Some cable and wireless providers will soon offer
Tiered Internet Services,
featuring progressively increasing price points to access sites suited to consumers' needs.
This pricing based on favoritism will mostly effect home-office users and
cord cutters
who access the Internet a lot.
For example, people who use Twitter and Instagram might trigger bills from their cable companies (tolls) for accessing those sites.
Even though Twitter & Instagram would pay the bills, they will pass those costs onto consumers in the form of more ads.
This idea goes against the core principal of the Internet, which provided equal access and equal opportunity for everyone.
- Many small tech businesses, already worried about cable companies crippling their innovative ideas by charging tolls, may find it harder to thrive in the early stages.
When an entrepreneur's new idea is relegated to slower speeds, they will find it hard to get users since
about half of mobile customers abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Startups may be forced to find cash to pay the fast-lane tolls, or
shift their offerings to other countries with lower costs to acquire customers (exporting their jobs & innovation to other countries).
Unlikely to happen, but technically could happen under the new FCC telecom rules:
- Internet providers who want to push their own political interests could block customer access to opposing viewpoints, but those cases would probably not happen.
It is true the FCC is dismantling the legal protections on which the Internet depends on, leaving
many people worried speech will be squashed, but most people will see sites slowed and rates go up.
Information will (probably) not be blocked.
This means the hypothetical ComcastSucks.com will still be accessible to Comcast customers, but it might load slower than other sites.
Regardless, changes will be slow to implement while
83% of Americans do not like the new FCC rules.
Telecom companies have a long history of
overcharging customers,
anticompetitive business practices,
and
the worst customer service in the US.
Those will be the companies now trusted to lead most of the US Internet content delivery for the foreseeable future.
It is doubtful they will operate with consumer and small business interests in mind, and will effect innovation and entrepreneurship as the cost of doing business online rises. |
