Fwiw, there was NN but it was during Obama. Trump, and his appointed Ajit Pai rolled it back.
Under Obama, data caps was not directly a NN thing. It was more that ISPs couldn’t favor one traffic over another. So where this got played out was if you had T-Mobile, they couldn’t do a Netflix deal where their traffic wasn’t counted but your traffic to Hulu was.
To be clear, I’m not in favor of data caps but want to make sure what NN is and what it isn’t.
My personal fear is that it may be too late. With the consolidation of the market since Trump, we don’t have a ton of options. I’d really like to see FCC take on monopolies like Amazon and Google but probably not enough time between now and the election to make a difference.
BeautifulMind@lemmy.world 1 year ago
TBH, this seems to point towards a model of connectivity provider that’s more in line with that of a utility than that of a vertically-integrated bandwidth+content-sales conglomerate.
We don’t need connectivity to come bundled with content; that just creates motive and opportunity for shitty ISPs to do anti-competitive bullshit like throttling competitors’ content.
Plus, the cost of delivering bandwidth has plummeted by more than 80% in just the last 15 years- there’s no reason for it to keep costing slightly more over time to have internet service, except that the people delivering it have a stock price to pump.
If we want net neutrality, we should separate ISPs from content providers in the same way we separated retail banking from investment banking