Here’s how companies have flouted net neutrality before and what made them stop

No matter what happens June 11, network neutrality repeal opens the door to some real abuses of internet service providers’ power — not hypothetical scenarios, but real predatory practices we’ve already seen in the past. These incidents show how complicated the issue of net neutrality is: all of these transgressions happened after the 2005 Internet Policy Statement, which laid out four “open internet” principles that would guide the agency’s decisions.

• Comcast blocks peer-to-peer networks: In 2007, America’s second-largest internet service provider was caught injecting its own commands into users’ internet traffic, stalling peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent and Gnutella.
• AT&T block skype: when Skype came to iOS in April 2009, AT&T (which held an exclusive contract for the iPhone) convinced Apple to block calls made over its wireless network.
• Verizon protects ISIS and blocks Google Wallet: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon announced a mobile payment system called Isis in 2010, but before it had a chance to launch, Google announced its own Google Wallet payment app for Android. Google tried to add Wallet to Samsung Galaxy Nexus phones on Verizon, but Verizon reportedly nixed the plan; publicly, it claimed the system wasn’t compatible with the Galaxy Nexus NFC chip.
• MetroPCS blocks everything but YouTube: Just a month after the Open Internet Order passed, MetroPCS launched a discount phone plan that seemed to violate its spirit. The $40 plan offered unlimited talking, texting, and web browsing. But if you wanted to stream audio or video, your only option was YouTube, unless you paid extra for “additional data access.”