Remember the scandal of the telecom operators being pulled up for price fixing?
Now the same players are involved in another controversy, but this time it’s about the Internet.
Obama officially made the Internet a public service and then the Trump administration reversed the balance by scrapping net neutrality rules.
Although this has got ideologists up in arms, what will it actually change in practice?
Under the net neutrality principle, all Internet data must be treated equally with no discrimination by content.
Ditching this principle means that an operator can censor services that compete with its own, such as Whatsapp for a mobile offering or Netflix for video on demand services.
When you’re stuck in a traffic jam, do you look enviously at the taxis and buses speeding along in the fast lane?
Some websites will feel the same about their competitors who have the money to pay operators for an “Internet fast lane”, i.e. a priority and higher-quality routing service.
The supporters of scrapping net neutrality say that the decision has been taken because “the time has come for the Internet, once again, to be driven by engineers, entrepreneurs, and consumers” by enabling prices to be adapted to the quality of the offering.
This means that the Internet has become deregulated again but has that come at the expense of equality?
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