The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death.<br />When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network<br />that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.<br />A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast<br />and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.<br />In a legal journal, he outlined an idea for regulation to preserve the internet’s equal-opportunity design — and hence was born “net neutrality.”<br />Though it has been through a barrage of legal challenges<br />and resurrections, some form of net neutrality has been the governing regime on the internet since 2005.<br />order would undo the idea completely; companies would be allowed to block or demand payment<br />for certain traffic as they liked, as long as they disclosed the arrangements.<br />At the time, there were persistent reports of broadband companies seeking to block or otherwise frustrate<br />these new services; in a few years, some broadband providers would begin blocking new services outright.<br />When I pointed out to a Comcast spokeswoman that the company’s promises were only voluntary —<br />that nothing will prevent Comcast from one day creating special tiers of internet service with bundled content, much like the way it now sells cable TV — she suggested I was jumping the gun
