As I understand this ruling, it means that businesses now have to pay extra to ISPs to have access to their websites through that ISP provided at a reasonable speed. If you donât pay, usersâ access to your website will be slowed to a crawl - so independent people and small businesses can forget about getting onto that high speed access tier.Â
This means that the American internet is going to be firmly under the control of those who have the most money. Youâll only get to see the content of those who can pay the ISPs to provide access at a reasonable speed. This means that you can expect to see skewed representation of just about everything, with those bigger businesses who can afford to pay ISPs a premium for access deciding what you can and cannot read, view and consume on the internet.
This is not something that we have in the UK. Our ISPs compete with each other to provide higher speeds, better services and lower prices, but because thereâs a monopoly in the US of a few ISPs who provide services, they can afford to do this to you. You canât go anywhere else, after all.
Everyone in the US needs to sign that petition, call their representatives, write angry letters and do whatever you can to tell your government that this ruling is Not Okay.