Complete Story
11/14/2016
Does Net Neutrality Stand a Chance in the Trump Era?
The Obama administration’s signature policy on technology was net neutrality. Rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015 prohibited internet service providers from treating web traffic differently depending on the service being used.
To Obama's FCC, the rules were a way to prevent broadband providers from inappropriately knee-capping companies like Netflix whose services competed with their own. Opponents saw a regulatory power grab. The rules are likely to face a serious challenge almost immediately once Donald Trump is sworn in. As a result, the web, especially streaming video services, could be headed down a very different path.
As with many issues, trying to glean the intentions of the incoming administration requires translating a few off-hand comments into a plan for public policy. Trump hasn’t spent a lot of time talking about net neutrality. But his baseline hostility to government regulation and a two-year-old tweet calling the FCC’s rules an “attack on the internet” have stoked expectations that net neutrality will be on the chopping block in early 2017. In a sense, it doesn’t matter how much Trump personally cares about this issue. Other Republicans do, and having control of Congress and the White House frees them up to enact a philosophy they held before the election.
