Why Internet Neutrality Matters?

On Thursday, December 14, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States repealed the internet neutrality law that was enacted in 2015 during Barack Obama's presidency. According to these laws, internet service providers cannot block access to a service for any reason or prioritize one service over another. With the repeal of these laws, many large technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Netflix, etc., expressed their objections to the FCC's action, and many organizations and companies in the U.S. are currently considering suing over this action in U.S. courts. However, a question that may arise is why there is so much uproar regarding internet neutrality and why large technology companies have also shown their opposition to the repeal of these laws. To answer these two questions, it is better to provide two examples to make the importance of internet neutrality easier to understand. Example 1: You are the owner of a startup. When internet neutrality laws are in place, no internet service provider can differentiate between various services. Therefore, whether you are a new startup or a large company like Google, users see no difference in accessing the services provided by you or Google. Now, if there are no internet neutrality laws, internet service providers can limit or block access to different services based on their own opinions, and in addition, they can show the content of one website faster and cheaper than another. This means that if you are the owner of a new startup and your startup is competing with another company, your competitor can pay the internet service provider to make access to their service better than yours, thus causing you to compete under unequal conditions, which may ultimately lead to the failure of your startup. Example 2: You are a personal brand. Like the previous example, when internet neutrality laws are in place, you can build your personal brand through various online tools such as social media and earn money from it. However, if there are no internet neutrality laws, you may have to pay internet service providers to optimize and speed up access to your website or online service. As seen in the two examples above, in the absence of internet neutrality laws, there is a risk that internet service providers will block or disrupt access to certain services based on their own interests. This is also the concern of large companies like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Netflix, etc., because if for any reason communication companies like AT&T decide to impose restrictions on access to these companies' various services, the revenue and business structure of these companies will face significant discrepancies. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the absence of internet neutrality laws also jeopardizes innovation and creativity because startups and new ideas may face difficulties in reaching their audiences or may be forced to pay fees to ensure that users can access the services they provide without issues and easily. Therefore, the issue of internet neutrality laws is of great importance, even though this concept has been meaningless in Iran for years due to internet filtering, and discussing internet neutrality in Iran is not very meaningful.