Net Neutrality has been one of the biggest issues in the tech sphere for quite some time, and now the United States Senate is poised to take a vote on whether to reverse the FCC’s repeal of the Obama-era internet protections on Wednesday, May 16. The vote is certainly not the end-all-be-all of the fight over Net Neutrality; even if the measure to reverse the repeal makes it through the Senate, it will have a harder time in the House of Representatives, which currently holds a large Republican majority. The issue got through the FCC on party lines, and has since been a cleanly divided battle between the two sides with very few stragglers. If it somehow gets through the House, it still has to face down President Donald Trump’s pen, and he technically has the final say on whether to approve or veto the measure.
Currently, the battle over Net Neutrality is being fought on many fronts. This vote is one of the more sweeping stages of the fight, but individual states have been challenging the FCC’s authority to enforce a clause barring them from putting their own Net Neutrality laws in place. Of these fighter states, California’s proposed legislation is the strictest, surpassing the original federal guideline it’s meant to replace. New York picked up a variant of the bill. Even if Wednesday’s vote or a future step fails, individual states enacting their own laws will continue the fight. Those states, however, could face challenges; no shortage of Net Neutrality opposition has stepped up and vowed to fight those states’ efforts, even to the point of suing them.
The FCC got a new chairman shortly after Donald Trump took the office of President, and that chairman, Ajit Pai, went on an immediate attack against the Obama Administration’s Title II Net Neutrality protections. When he eventually repealed them, it was an extremely controversial move made possible by a 3 to 2 Republican majority among FCC commissioners, and the backlash since then has been unceasing and unflinching. To say that this issue is divisive is arguably quite the understatement, and even if protections are put in place on way or another, they could end up torn down in the near future by proponents of giving ISPs more freedom to shape their services as they please. BestVPN expert Sean McGrath expects this future, calling these events “the beginning of the end” for a free and open web.