Regulations surrounding net neutrality to many might not seem like a big deal to most people, but to anyone who uses the internet it is.  

Net neutrality means that all internet traffic must be treated equally and ISPs or internet service providers cannot charge companies for better service and a faster connection. While the FCC says that these rules are not necessary and that ISPs wouldn’t do that, they have been for years. On Thursday, May 18th the FCC voted to roll back on the regulation of ISPs starting with Net Neutrality “ In a 2-1 vote along party lines Thursday, the FCC’s Republicans voted to propose a new review of the rules, with the goal of loosening the regulations on the industry…FCC Chairman Ajit Pai argued that the current rules represented a “bureaucratic straitjacket” on the industry.” stated NPR in an article about net neutrality.

While Chairman Pai can continue to argue that the regulations are bad for the ISPs, keeping all internet traffic free makes sure that even the smallest website will be as fast as the Facebook or Google and it allows for growth in the industry and keeps companies from having to pay for their service to even work like Netflix and Riot Games did in New York.    

Last year the State of New York sued Time Warner cable over the company throttling the speeds of high bandwidth services such as Netflix and Riot Games “League of Legends” “In the case of Netflix, the company refused to pay for access to TWC’s customers. In response, TWC didn’t cut them off entirely. Instead, it allegedly just neglected to upgrade the port capacity between TWC and Netflix, causing slower connections. Netflix offered to install, for free, its own OpenConnect hardware to ensure that it could deliver its content smoothly to TWC customers. TWC declined, instead continuing to insist that Netflix pay up.” said New York Magazine in an article about Time Warner in New York State.

In the case of Riot Games, “The state claims much of the same is true in the case of Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, which initially refused to pay TWC until caving in August of 2015. Before the deal was struck, lag and data-packet loss (i.e., two of the things that can badly affect how well online game plays) for League of Legends players were far above the standards Riot liked to see.” said New York Magazine. When it comes to internet speeds a user wants a low ping, no lag, and no loss of data-packets. Having a high level of this for just the connection to the game leads to large issues for the player and can reflect badly on the company for having bad servers.

“After it struck a deal, the numbers improved. Again, while it was in an ongoing dispute with one of the most popular online games in the world, TWC was also advertising that subscribers would experience games ‘with no lag time.’” It was clear that TWC was using this as a way to extract money from big name companies so that their customers would be able to use their products.

It is clear that without the FCC enforcing the regulations on net neutrality that this will continue to happen and that in order to keep website running quickly the FCC will have to keep the regulations on net neutrality.