New York Times

[Commentary] Strong network neutrality rules don’t just protect companies — they also protect you as a consumer and ensure that you’re getting the full services you’re paying for. If an internet provider slows or blocks a site that you want to look at, it is denying you the right to freely choose the content that’s important to you. To see this more clearly, it’s crucial to understand that net neutrality concerns the delivery of data only once it reaches your internet provider’s network, which is only a small part of the internet as a whole.

With Twitter as his Excalibur, the president takes on his doubters, powered by long spells of cable news and a dozen Diet Cokes. But if President Donald Trump has yet to bend the presidency to his will, he is at least wrestling it to a draw.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to vote on 12/14 to roll back the net neutrality rules in the United States. While the European Union has such rules in place, telecom providers have pushed the boundaries at times in Sweden, Germany, Portugal and elsewhere, offering a glimpse at the future American companies and consumers may face if protections are watered down. Europe adopted net neutrality rules aimed at ensuring that ISPs in the bloc’s 28 member states can’t pick the web’s winners and losers.

Hundreds of protests were staged across the country on Dec 7 in the latest uproar over a repeal of rules ensuring an open internet. The drumbeat of action can in good part be traced back to a yellow Victorian house in Worcester (MA). The home is the nerve center for Fight for the Future, a scrappy 10-person nonprofit that has helped lead the opposition to the change — even if its effort to protect so-called net neutrality has the longest of odds.

Our present panics tend to arrive just as new parts of our economy, culture and politics are reconstituted within platform marketplaces — shifts that have turned out to be bigger than anyone anticipated. Aggravation about “fake news” followed the realization that the business and consumption of online news had been substantially captured by Facebook, which had strenuously resisted categorization as a media company. Children’s entertainment has migrated to new and unexpected venues faster and more completely than either parents or YouTube expected or accounted for.