Judging from the 2-1 vote, this was the ruling of a 3-judge panel, not the full Circuit Court, which is the next step in the appeals process.

It's the end of US dominance

The rest of the world will reroute around the infected area

Yeah. I just came in to say what @1 said.

But also it is inventible that the money interests will win out. They are the ones controlling all the portals. Unless we some how successfully lobby to turn internet service into a government run utility. But Christ. We can't even do that that with something as basic and crucial as healthcare.

Eventually, if the cable television and mobile carrier industries are any indicator, the internet as we know it now will only be available to those who can pay a premium. like everything else.

The average user will get nickel and dime'd to utilize anything but minuscule amounts of bandwidth.

We will look back that the late nineties and early 2000's as the wild west and by-gone golden age of the internet.

@3,

It seems like that's already the case given how much Americans pay for inferior Internet service (compared to the rest of the first world).

As was already said on lol le reddit:

The FCC can't enforce any net neutrality rules. It has to become a law via Congress. It was struck down because it was inappropriate for the FCC to be set with in the first place.

@4 It will get even worse here.

And make no mistake the big telecoms are going to stratify connectivity in Europe too.

I remember traveling in Europe back in the late nineties/early 2000's most major European cities had free public wireless. That didn't last long.

If you're not A common carrier doesn't that mean that you can be held responsible for any content you carry?

How would investing in internet infrastructure effect this? Is net neutrality still important (practically, not morally) to the user if bandwidth is no longer an issue, or are we talking such impossibly massive amounts of data that no degree of bandwidth would keep the little guy from getting buried.

Any network architects here?

Sad, but not surprising, that telecoms and the FCC would spend hundreds of millions of dollars arguing this than simply putting it towards resources that may help solve the issue.

@7, the CDA immunizes "interactive computer services" from claims that would treat them like publishers (e.g., defamation). Verizon is still an interactive computer service under the CDA.

@8 The question of bandwidth capacity isn't really material since, say, your cable company could simply throttle Netflix. It doesn't matter whether there is enough bandwidth, only this many bits will get through. You want to see Netflix well, either you need to sign up for the Netflix package from your cable provider or Netflix needs to pay a back-end fee for all their subscribers.

Today I pay a fixed rate for so much bandwidth and Netflix pays a fixed rate for bandwidth on their end. Tomorrow, every company that owns a link between me and Netflix could charge a tariff not to throttle that feed.

The big players like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, XBoxLive, etc. will be the first to battle and bargain, but there's no reason why even less bandwidth heavy applications shouldn't face pressure. Once packets are prioritized there's no end to the opportunities to sell "enhanced" services by throttling everything else.

@10 Ahhh, good point.

@7: Yes, in fact that bit one of the old pre-internet services (GEnie?). They started to filter content. They'd get sued for blocking things that should have gone through and sued for letting through stuff that shouldn't. The non-filtering services claimed common carrier and lobbied for that status.

I don't think this is even a business win.

On the other hand, in 2014, I wouldn't be surprised if laws are passed that give the ISPs the advantages of common carrier and none of the responsibilties. It seems to be the American way of late.

And how does this fit into the phone-over-ISP services?

@8 - as an engineer: yes, it matters, a lot. The short answer is that would-be-monopolists like VZ and Comcast would love to get rid of net neutrality because they already over-sell capacity and this relieves them of the need to do any infrastructure investment. In short, we had tons of excess capacity before everyone started streaming Netflix. This is, BTW, all about Netflix eating Comast's (and other cable operators) content revenue.

The "crisis" is manufactured by simply refusing to upgrade the (already oversold and insufficient) infrastructure - and when we hit bottlenecks in the last mile (something you already supposedly pay for as the consumer), the ISP just prioritizes the traffic to their own services - that is, if there's a resource pinch, just make the VZ or Crapcast streaming movie service take priority. Pretty soon you subscribe for your content from the ISP (and they get vertical integration - ie, monopolist - revenue - by "bundling") because you get tired of watching Netflix "buffering".

If Netflix panics and pays the ransom/toll for equal priority on the last mile, passing the cost onto you the subscriber, then the ISP still gets that revenue from you, for something you are already paying for: your link. Nice, huh? Win-win for erecting a new toll booth.

Netflix can probably get away with this (pushing the new toll on you) but forget about "innovation" and "new services". I don't think it's likely that dKos readers will suddenly find Comcast sends their packets off into the bit-bucket, but expect for the cost of your un-bundled streaming services (and things like Hulu and Aereo) to get squeezed and hard.

Also, yes, phone-over-ISP will get targeted. Latency tolerant services (like http pages) won't get hit, but anything dependent on low latency will be a target.