With the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) poised to dismantle net neutrality rules this month, there's been a lot of talk of an internet doomsday. If internet providers become powerful gatekeepers, deciding what you see and how much you’ll pay to see it, this would have dire implications for anyone looking to cancel cable TV in favor of cheaper streaming video services.
But while Comcast and other providers have denied that they’ll ruin the internet in such dramatic fashion, the reality is that they don’t have to. Under the current FCC, these companies have already been granted a more insidious form of gatekeeper power. With a practice called zero-rating, internet service providers can omit their own streaming video services from the data caps that are becoming commonplace in home broadband.
Existing net neutrality regulations provide some protection against these practices, but the FCC no longer has any interest in enforcing them. And once the FCC eliminates net neutrality rules entirely, it'll remove the last defense mechanism consumers have against punitive data caps. Read the full column on TechHive.
