US Federal Communications Agency (FCC) approved bringing back net neutrality rules that were repealed in 2018. Of the five voting members of the commission, three voted in favor of returning the rules prohibiting providers from paying for higher priority, blocking access and limiting the speed of access to content and services distributed legally.
In accordance with the decision, broadband access will be treated as an “information service” and not a “telecommunications service,” which will put content distributors and telecom operators on the same level and will not allow discrimination against one of the parties. The rules will also give the FCC the ability to require providers to report crashes, conduct security oversight, and monitor how problems are resolved.
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Proponents of net neutrality, which include mainly large content providers and online services, consider all types of traffic to be equally significant and oppose discrimination against content distributors by allowing telecom operators to separate priorities for different types and sources of traffic. Such a division can lead to a deterioration in the quality of access to some sites and types of data by increasing the priority for others, and also complicate the introduction of new services to the market, since they will initially lose in terms of quality of access to services that paid providers to increase the priority of their traffic. According to net neutrality supporters, the rules being introduced are important for protecting consumer rights and preventing abuse by telecom operators.
Opponents of neutrality, among whom Internet providers and network equipment manufacturers predominate, defend the possibility of changing priorities for different types of traffic at their discretion, for example, in order to organize the collection of royalties from content providers for increasing the speed of access to their resources or to improve the quality of access to own services by limiting the speed of competitors’ services. Opponents of the new rules also believe that additional regulation of broadband providers will lead to a slowdown in the development of the telecommunications industry and increased government oversight of the industry, despite the fact that net neutrality has so far been perfectly regulated through the market through competition.
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