Securing net neutrality

In less than a year, the Donald Trump presidency in the U.S. has administered quite a few body blows to many a signature achievement of his predecessor Barack Obama — for instance, the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate pact. Another addition to this list must be the decision by the government agency, the Federal Communications Commission, to remove regulations that have disallowed Internet service providers in the U.S. from throttling, blocking or speeding up Internet content for firms that pay for faster access for customers. This is a major blow to “net neutrality” in the U.S. Net neutrality is at the core of an open Internet that does not allow for content discrimination by ISPs. Internet pioneers such as Vint Cerf who co-invented the TCP/IP network protocol, and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee have also emphasised the centrality of the principle of net neutrality, asserting that its inviolability has been built into the structure of the Internet itself — in its layers and protocols that allow for seamless access to any networked device in the world irrespective of the nature of the physical infrastructure that has built the network. Also, before the 2015 order, there were increasing instances of ISPs introducing faster lanes for various kinds of content, which brought the net neutrality debate to public attention in the U.S.