What the End of U.S. Net Neutrality Means For You

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Net neutrality, the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally, was heralded by the Federal Communications Commission and open Internet advocates. A federal court struck down the FCC’s ability to enforce the policy earlier this month. What does that mean for the free and open Internet? Associate technology editor Ben Guarino joins host Rachel Feltman to review the state rules that could preserve net neutrality and ways that telecommunications giants could leverage the lack of federal regulation against their competitors. Recommended reading: What the End of U.S. Net Neutrality Means E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman with guest Ben Guarino. Our show is edited by Fonda Mwangi with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:32.7	For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman. Earlier this month, net neutrality was back in
0:38.7	the news thanks to a U.S. appeals court ruling. The decision stated that the Federal Communications
0:43.4	Commission, or FCC, didn't have the power to reinstate net neutrality rules, which the agency
0:49.2	voted to do in April with the encouragement of then-president Joe Biden. Now, I'll be honest, net neutrality is one of
0:55.5	those issues that I've just never quite bothered to fully wrap my head around. So what is it?
1:01.0	And what will happen now that the FCC can't enforce it? Here to explain everything for us is Ben
1:06.4	Guarino, an Associate Technology Editor at Scientific American.
1:16.7	Ben, thanks for coming on to chat.
1:17.8	Thanks for having me.
1:21.3	This is a question I feel like I should be able to answer by now, but I can't.
1:23.2	What is net neutrality?
1:29.6	So in the simplest terms, net neutrality is this idea that all internet traffic should be treated equally. So if I am trying to access YouTube or Netflix or Hulu or really anything, my
1:39.6	internet service provider, my ISP, is going to treat all of those data packets coming from those websites
1:45.4	like they'd be coming from any other website.
1:48.1	So why are we hearing about net neutrality in the news? What's been going on with it?
1:53.4	There has been a huge debate over whether net neutrality should exist in the United States.
1:59.5	The internet service providers say, well, if you put these
	...

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