Net neutrality has been in the news a lot recently. The FCC just finished putting rules in place to enforce net neutrality in a pretty big way. The FCC is now regarding Internet service providers as common carriers. This lumps ISPs in with telephone providers, but with a slightly different set of rules. The FCC tried to avoid the common carrier classification but was forced to do so when its previous rules were challenged in court and the FCC lost.

Years ago the FCC put rules in place that provided a fair environment for all websites on the Internet. Verizon sued to have the rules overturned, stating that the FCC didn’t have the authority to create or enforce the old net neutrality rules. The U.S. Supreme Court actually agreed with Verizon but in its opinion the Supreme Court said if the FCC wanted to enforce rules over ISPs, then the FCC needed to classify the ISPs as a common carrier under Title II. That’s what the FCC just did.

Net neutrality is a term that refers to how ISPs treat traffic on the Internet. Most ISPs are your cable TV service provider. Your cable TV provider makes a lot of money when you sign up for a cable package. Recently, the number of people subscribing to cable TV packages has been going down. I’ve written a few times about this new “cord cutting” phenomenon and how to cancel your cable subscription while still being able to watch most of your favorite shows.

Services such as Netflix and Sling TV (Google it, it’s a great service) and Amazon Prime all offer a way to watch TV and movies while streaming them over the Internet. Subscribing to all three of those services would be less expensive than a typical cable TV subscription. HBO is getting into the fray as well with its new service, HBO Now, which is supposed to launch in April. I know HBO already has a streaming service with HBO Go but HBO Go requires a cable TV subscription that has HBO as a channel. HBO Now is going to be independent of any cable TV subscriptions. As you might imagine, the ISPs who are also providers of cable TV don’t like it when someone purchases an Internet subscription but not a cable TV subscription.

One way cable providers combat this is by slowing down traffic from websites such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. If people cannot use alternatives, then they’ll have no choice but to subscribe to cable TV to get access to the shows that they want. When the FCC reclassified ISPs as common carriers, that practice was disallowed. The reclassification of ISPs to common carriers does a few things.

First, an ISP cannot block lawful content, services, application and devices. ISPs are still allowed to do things like block spam or other harmful activities like attacks.

Second, throttling is disallowed. This means that an ISP has to treat all traffic the same. Services like Netflix cannot be slowed down to the point of being unusable.

Third, no paid prioritization. This means that a website cannot pay an ISP to give its traffic priority over other sites.

The FCC is not doing anything else. ISPs are still free to charge what they want and create new packages to sell to customers. The FCC is not regulating what content can or cannot be on the Internet, just that it all be treated equally.