So what does this mean? I was recently asked, and having closely followed this issue for years, here is my short answer (the long answer includes a history of the telegraph, US monopoly law, telecommunications line sharing agreements, Common Accommodations rules in Historic Britain, and other topics):
Sir Tim
Berners Lee created the World Wide Web, and put it best: "If I pay to
connect to the Net with a given quality of service, and you pay to
connect to the net with the same or higher quality of service, then you
and I can communicate across the net, with that quality and quantity of
service". (from wikipedia )
Common Carriers are a set of service providers which transport goods or people on behalf of the public at large, and include everyone from AT&T to Fedex to Southwest Airlines to Conrail. In exchange for being allowed to provide that sort of service to the public at large for money, they are required to not do certain things, like looking in your package, not delivering it if they dislike it, or discriminating against certain people or destinations. Fedex can't burn your package because it contains UPS advertisements, for example. They don't own the content being transported, and are generally liable if it is damaged en route.
In the US, Internet access providers were considered common carriers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act until 2005, when Comcast petitioned the FCC to reclassify them as unregulated information services. With this new freedom, Comcast and other ISPs began "traffic shaping" based on the kind of traffic or the destination - the FCC actually fined Comcast for throttling bittorrent. Though they were also caught throttling Vonage which competed with Comcast's own voice over IP product, they weren't fined for that behavior specifically.
The problem was that the FCC had already given up regulatory oversight in 2005. So a judge overturned the fine, and we've been fighting over what Net Neutrality rules should be in place ever since. ISPs would like to use traffic shaping to fit more services onto existing pipes to maximize profit in the short term without having to build out more infrastructure - however in order to do so, they want to prioritize their own traffic over that of their competition, which is a huge barrier to entry for new businesses.
In theory, Net Neutrality would prevent an ISP from throttling or blocking traffic that competed with its own products, or that it didn't like (example: Telus in Canada blocked the website of union it was in dispute negotiations with). The devil is in the details of course, and Tom Wheeler, the current chairman of the FCC, wants a Title II light: Title II/Common Carrier that allowed "managed services" - AKA throttling competing traffic. That version of Net Neutrality would be worse than nothing, codifying anti-competitive preferential treatment for ISP's products over their competitors and likely preventing new businesses from competing at all.
TL;DR: ISPs are carrying data for third parties and delivering it to you - they are acting as common carriers, they just aren't regulated like common carriers, which is historically dangerous.
Common Carriers are a set of service providers which transport goods or people on behalf of the public at large, and include everyone from AT&T to Fedex to Southwest Airlines to Conrail. In exchange for being allowed to provide that sort of service to the public at large for money, they are required to not do certain things, like looking in your package, not delivering it if they dislike it, or discriminating against certain people or destinations. Fedex can't burn your package because it contains UPS advertisements, for example. They don't own the content being transported, and are generally liable if it is damaged en route.
In the US, Internet access providers were considered common carriers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act until 2005, when Comcast petitioned the FCC to reclassify them as unregulated information services. With this new freedom, Comcast and other ISPs began "traffic shaping" based on the kind of traffic or the destination - the FCC actually fined Comcast for throttling bittorrent. Though they were also caught throttling Vonage which competed with Comcast's own voice over IP product, they weren't fined for that behavior specifically.
The problem was that the FCC had already given up regulatory oversight in 2005. So a judge overturned the fine, and we've been fighting over what Net Neutrality rules should be in place ever since. ISPs would like to use traffic shaping to fit more services onto existing pipes to maximize profit in the short term without having to build out more infrastructure - however in order to do so, they want to prioritize their own traffic over that of their competition, which is a huge barrier to entry for new businesses.
In theory, Net Neutrality would prevent an ISP from throttling or blocking traffic that competed with its own products, or that it didn't like (example: Telus in Canada blocked the website of union it was in dispute negotiations with). The devil is in the details of course, and Tom Wheeler, the current chairman of the FCC, wants a Title II light: Title II/Common Carrier that allowed "managed services" - AKA throttling competing traffic. That version of Net Neutrality would be worse than nothing, codifying anti-competitive preferential treatment for ISP's products over their competitors and likely preventing new businesses from competing at all.
TL;DR: ISPs are carrying data for third parties and delivering it to you - they are acting as common carriers, they just aren't regulated like common carriers, which is historically dangerous.
