Only the survivors have noticed the difference.
They said we would be neanderthals by now, savages scraping ourselves with pieces of broken pottery every time our cat videos wouldn’t buffer. But the Internet apocalypse hasn’t happened.
It has been remarkably unremarkable without net neutrality, one year after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai killed the Obama-era Internet rule that required service providers to treat each piece of content identically.
“No big changes,” reads a Wired headline atop an article explaining that “broadband providers didn’t make any drastic new moves to block or cripple the delivery of content after the FCC’s order revoking its Obama-era net neutrality protections took effect.”
Everything has been fine, in other words. Someone should check on the folks below, though. They didn’t just think that the Internet would go dark. They thought that corporations would conspire to create a digital fiefdom where access to information was throttled and people couldn’t communicate freely except by carrier pigeon.
GLAAD feared gays and lesbians would be targeted.
The repeal of #NetNeutrality is an attack on the LGBTQ community
https://t.co/by6r9dtIY9
— GLAAD (@glaad) December 14, 2017