The cable companies and telcos who dominate the U.S. market for Internet access won a victory when they succeeded in having the heart of the FCC’s ruling on net neutrality struck down. Now, for the first time legally, those companies can both block content and offer fast lane services at their discretion.
I have mentioned several times in my recent series of blogs that the eventual outcome of this decision may not be as obvious as we first thought: it may be less bad than network neutrality advocates feared, and rather less wonderful than some of the anti-neutrality advocates hoped. In previous blogs, I mentioned that neither the device vendors nor the edge providers will sit by passively and let the carrier’s Internet service providers (ISPs) call all the shots. To really understand this, it is worth reviewing other aspects of the Internet as they are actually evolving, as compared to the somewhat static model apparently envisioned by the courts, the FCC and some of the carriers.