Bring Back Net Neutrality

In January, a federal appeals court struck down the FCC's regulations regarding net neutrality. In arguments in that case, Verizon indicated that it wanted to pursue "different pricing service models."

(In other words, they want to throttle traffic for content providers who don't pay up. In fact, they want it so badly that they stated it five separate times during arguments.)

In the wake of the ruling, it appears that Verizon is doing exactly that. Reportedly, Verizon reps are telling customers that the reason that services (such as Netflix) that run on Amazon's AWS platform run so slowly on Verizon's network is that they are being throttled.

(Verizon is clearly betraying its New Jersey roots. "That's a real nice service you're offering there. It would be a real shame if something happened to it." Who knew that they had hired Tony Soprano to plan their corporate strategy?)

Earlier this week, House and Senate Democrats introduced legislation to re-institute the former net neutrality rules. The legislation is known as the Open Internet Preservation Act.

Good luck to them. Given that most people have a very limited selection of broadband providers, I'm not sure how the FCC ever considered them anything other than common carriers.