Net Neutrality and the COVID-19 Pandemic

June will mark the two-year anniversary that the FCC changed its position about Net Neutrality, the legal requirement that requires Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to treat all content equally. That is, your favorite news website gets equal priority with your favorite social media platform, your favorite recipe website, Netflix, Youtube, and everyone else. Net Neutrality gave us the promise that all content would be treated equally. After all, we are paying our ISPs for the access to the Internet, not to regulate what content we can use, or how fast it will be delivered.

In those two years, little has changed, it seems. There haven't been massive slow-downs of content. I don't have to pay extra to use social media, or anything else (although I keep accruing more and more subscriptions to different content providers, but that's a story for another time).

So, was FCC chairman Ajit Pai right, were Net Neutrality proponents really just doomsayers? Perhaps.

The good news is that we didn't see massive changes prior to March 2020 when the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. No, the business world largely stopped working in the old office model and those of us who were able, started working from home. Not only can I securely work from home, I video chat with my coworkers all day every day -- and I *do* mean ALL DAY. 

But, what if...

What if my ISP (or yours) had decided to block Video Calling, or VoIP, or VPNs, or whatever. Or what if they decided to ratchet down the speeds to Netflix unless we paid a premium? Or worse yet, what if they blocked it altogether while we were all secluded in our homes? It could have made a terrible thing much, much worse. 

They didn't. But under the FCC's rules of June 2018, they could. And that's the point. Because they might still.