Before President-elect Donald Trump takes office this week, take a moment to remember the height of the net neutrality battles of 2014 and 2015. Remember the letter writing campaigns, the comments filed to the Federal Communications Commission (some of them handwritten), remember John Oliver's rant. Remember that the people fought, and the people won, and for a brief moment, big telecom monopolies had at least some limits placed on them by the federal government.
Remember it now, because very likely, the anti-regulation commissioners of the FCC, reporting to an anti-regulation president, are about to undo the rules millions of Americans fought so hard for. Under Trump, big telecom and its sympathizers will call the shots.
This means that net neutrality protections that prevent internet service providers from slowing down certain types of traffic will very likely go away. It means Netflix may once again have to pay Comcast to ensure its customers can watch shows without buffering (it also means, for example, that ISPs would be able to charge you extra to stream Netflix as opposed to content on an ISP-owned platform). And it means that the blatant net neutrality violations being perpetrated by wireless carriers—the "free data streaming" for certain types of data—will continue and will likely never be stopped by the FCC.
But the protracted net neutrality legal battle wasn't for naught. Important seeds were sown during those months of activism that raised public awareness about an important but obscure and relatively complicated telecom regulatory rule that could have easily gone unnoticed were it not for the protests, late-night television coverage, and information campaigns on sites like Reddit.
"Because we have net neutrality now, those seeds are out there," Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, told me. "Our biggest enemy is ignorance, so when things go badly and cable bills go up under Trump, and we have to pay more to access certain sites, people will say 'Wait a minute, this is a violation of net neutrality.' We're in such a better position to fight now."
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