外刊阅读20250218｜联邦法院关于网络中立性的裁决对互联网的意义

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Feltman: This is a question I feel like I should be able to answer by now, but I can’t: What is net neutrality?

Guarino: So in the simplest terms, net neutrality is this idea that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. So if I am trying to access YouTube or Netflix or Hulu or really anything, my Internet service provider, my ISP, is going to treat all of those data packets coming from those websites like they’d be coming from any other websit.

Feltman: So why are we hearing about net neutrality in the news? What’s been going on with it?

Guarino: There has been a huge debate over whether net neutrality should exist in the United States. The Internet service providers, “Well, if you put these regulations on us, it’s going to stifle competition. It is against the American ideals of capitalism.” And then you have consumers and Internet advocates and people who cherish the idea of the open Internet that really gets to the founding ideals of what the Internet should be—it should be free; it should be for the flow of information—that say, “We should, we should hold ourselves to net neutrality.” And so it boils down to who should be regulating it. And the courts recently decided that the Federal Communications Commission cannot treat the Internet with net neutrality principles.

Feltman: Interesting. What’s next? What does that mean for people who are pushing for a free and open Internet?

Guarino: So if the FCC does not have the ability to regulate ISPs like a telecommunication service—that means that these services have to act in the “public interest,” which has higher standards that they have to be held to—if the FCC isn’t the one that can enforce these net neutrality principles, then it’s in Congress’s hands or it’s in the state’s hands.

Feltman: Okay, is this good news or bad news for the open Internet?

Guarino: It’s bad news for the people who advocate for the open Internet. So if there’s no federal oversight of net neutrality, what we have now are the state laws that support net neutrality. And these are on the books in lots of places—in Washington state, in Oregon, in California—and it had kinda looked like maybe they weren’t really being enforced because the thinking was, “Well, if there’s federal oversight of net neutrality, maybe we don’t have to worry about our own states.” Now that equation changes a little bit.

Feltman: And from the perspective of the ISPs, what’s limiting about net neutrality? What are they trying to do, hoping to do that this sort of free and open Internet won’t allow them to do?

Guarino: So the theory goes that if I can treat one data packet differently from another data packet, I could slow your traffic to Netflix. Maybe I have a competitor streaming service—and I should back up a second: we talk about net neutrality a lot in terms of video streaming because it’s data intensive and, like, something like two thirds of Internet traffic is video streaming, so that’s why net neutrality and video services tend to go hand in hand. But if I am an Internet service provider and maybe I have a competitor website to Netflix or Hulu and I want to have more people use my service, then I can slow their connection to Netflix and maybe shunt them towards my competitor.