On December 14, 2017, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the Obama era changes on net neutrality, the principle that the public have fair and equal access to the Internet and the information that is on it. Due to this, the companies that provide Internet services have more power to regulate what we as consumers can access through their network as well as to charge more for better or more reliable Internet connection.

In 1990 the World Wide Web came available and forever changed how the average person can find information and make our world even smaller. With that such access, some governments called for regulations, restricting what their citizens can do. Others treated the Internet as a commodity, available for all, but still with some regulations. In the United States, the FCC controls Internet regulation. More intense regulations were put into place after 9/11, but rolled back during President Obama’s term administration to help regulate companies control of Internet access and prices.

The FCC’s decision was highly controversial, even across party lines. A survey from the University of Maryland shows that 83% of those polled disagreed with the FCC with three out of four Republicans polled disagreeing. Even when the country is harshly divided along party lines after the 2016, both agreed here. The FCC had gone against what the people had wanted and listened to the Internet providers so that they would make more profit from the Internet and its consumers.

Internet providers such as AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have already been regulating what their consumers can do with their networks even with the Obama era regulations. According to the ACLU, in 2007, Verizon cut off a messaging program that the pro-choice group, NARAL, had used to reach its supporters. Once this was discovered by the public, the outcry had been enough for Verizon to reverse its censorship.

Obama era regulations are what had ended this. Now that they are gone, Internet providers can get away with this if the public does not fight back as it had before. They are able to slow connection speeds to certain websites, get their customers to go to certain websites, or entirely block certain websites. They also can control internet speeds through their prices: the higher the price, the higher the speed.

This has already been happening for years. Consumers have found when getting a new phone plan two different plans for mobile data: the cheapest one had slower connections on a non-priority line, with the more expensive one on a priority line with better connection speeds. Without the Obama era rules of net neutrality, Internet providers will be able to widen the gap between costs for good or bad Internet as well as control more of what we can or cannot access as consumers.