Net Neutrality Was Back, Until It Wasn't (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0180492737
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/31/1736226/net-neutrality-was-back-until-it-wasnt
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/report/851629/net-neutrality-fcc-retrospective-2025
The removal, The Verge summarizes in a report, was part of Chairman Brendan Carr's "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative targeting what the agency deems unnecessary regulations. Federal net neutrality rules have now been on and off for 15 years, passing under Obama in 2010, returning in 2015, getting overturned in 2017, and briefly revived in 2024 before courts struck them down again.
Matt Wood, vice president of policy and general counsel at nonprofit Free Press, told The Verge that ISPs often feel little financial impact from these rules. "A lot of their complaints about the supposed 'burdens' from these rules are really just ideological in nature," Wood said. States have filled the void.
California's 2018 law remains the nation's gold standard, and Maine passed a bipartisan bill in June. John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, said state-level laws and the threat of new ones "has kept some of the worst outcomes in check."
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is now pressuring states to exempt ISPs from net neutrality laws to remain eligible for broadband infrastructure funding. Chao Jun Liu of the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the year's pattern: "ISPs just want to do whatever they want to do with no limits and nobody telling them how to do it."
[1] https://www.theverge.com/report/851629/net-neutrality-fcc-retrospective-2025
Golden state standard? (Score:3)
From the fine summary:
> California's 2018 law remains the nation's gold standard,
Only if you think net neutrality is a good idea. My gold standard would be to have no law at all.
As many have mentioned, given the on-again, off-again nature of NN regulation, I think we can pretty confidently say the Interwebs will collapse into a post-apocalyptic cesspool of hate and venality regardless of whether we have NN regulations.
Net Neutrality Means Nothing (Score:2)
This law has been on and off as the summary states but fundamentally it hasn't changed anything. No providers changed their rules materially, no new services were created or destroyed, no websites failed to function.
I think the pro Net Neutrality side is coming at it from a place of good intent to protect but they fundamentally misunderstand how the big providers operate. This has been true since at least 2003 when the ideas first escaped academia and started a political movement. In 2025, arguably, we ar
Things have changed a lot (Score:3)
The increasing deployment of Multi gigabit has made individual file downloads almost trivial and better codecs means even high resolution video only takes a few dozen megabits of bandwidth. On the other hand ddossing by AI bots and malware is eating a lot of the surplus bandwidth.
Re: (Score:2)
The good thing is that with multli-gigabit speeds available to home, deep packet inspection is practically impossible making it harder to throttle and limit speeds. When everyone was on 50Mbps, it was easy because a software DPI system running on relatively beefy hardware could process at gigabit speeds and throttle companies that refused to pay the full speed ransom. You could stick a box on every node in the neighbourhood cheaply.
But as homes started getting gigabit and faster speeds, equipment that can f