About two weeks ago the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) Chairman Tom Wheeler stated that soon new rules will be proposed that might allow Internet services providers to demand payments to avoid filters on competitors’ traffic. This could disrupt the Internet with higher costs for users. In response, more than one hundred technology companies sent a joint letter (it’s a PDF file) to the FCC asking to protect net neutrality.
A few days ago, Mozilla Foundation proposed to separate the consumer market from the one among operators and to consider the latter as part of the telecommunications market in which rules that still impose net neutrality would be applied. Later, Mozilla joined other industry giants ranging from Google to Amazon, from E-bay to Facebook, from Twitter to Microsoft and many other names along with others a little smaller for a total of over a hundred companies.
This coalition asks that the Internet is free and open. They point out that in the last twenty years, American innovators have brought tremendous progress, economic as well, also thanks to net neutrality. The ability for small businesses to grow without the burden of having to pay operators to avoid filters on their services allowed the development of e-commerce, social networking and many other services started from scratch.
The new FCC proposals could create a situation where only the operators that can pay to prevent their services from being filtered will be successful. It’s clear that in the end the cost would fall on their customers and could prevent start-ups from developing new services.
For some big providers it would be an advantage to turn a free market in a sort of oligarchy with monopolistic tendencies. Internet isn’t the only sector where a few corporations seek to control the market and when they succed the effects are always negative for consumers.
The next rules, which could be approved on May 15, will be binding in the USA but of course what happens there has big effects on the rest of the world. The proposals announced last month immediately caused a controversy, the stance of over a hundred companies in the sector gives a hope that the Internet remains the way it’s been so far rather instead of starting to turn into a jungle full of cutthroats.
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