Net Neutrality Repeal Takes Major Step Toward Happening

CYBERSPACE—In what may prove to be very bad news for the online porn industry, not to mention fans, the Federal Communications Commission made its December decision to roll back Obama-era “net neutrality” rules official on Thursday, publishing its order with the Orwellian title “Restoring Internet Freedom” in the Federal Register. The publication is a required step toward implementing the order, which would end rules that stop internet service providers from blocking or slowing down traffic to certain online sites, while favoring others—usually because the favored sites will have paid a premium fee for access to “internet fast lanes.” The Republican-majority FCC board voted 3-2 along party lines in December to ditch net neutrality rules put in place in 2015 by President Barack Obama’s “Open Internet Order,” which mandated that ISPs—many of them the country’s largest telecommunications companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon—treat all internet traffic equally. By publishing the order on Thursday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Donald Trump appointee, started the clock on a 60-day waiting period before the order may take full effect, meaning that if the FCC’s repeal order is not blocked by the courts or congress, net neutrality appears likely to end in the United States (and for much of the rest of the world) on April 23, 2018. AT&T has reportedly already taken steps to take advantage of the repeal, introducing a new “feature” that allows content providers to pay extra to exempt their traffic from counting against AT&T customer data caps—one version of a paid “fast lane” for internet traffic. Why does the repeal of net neutrality bode ill for porn? In short, not only can ISPs block off porn sites and offer them as a separate package to internet consumers at a separate, possibly steep price over and above regular monthly online access fees, but the possibility of their complete censorship now becomes alarmingly real. For a fuller explanation of why the repeal of net neutrality could pose a serious problem for adult content online, see the AVN.com article accessible at this link. With the number of states declaring porn a threat to public health about to reach six, state and local governments could now step in, offering ISPs incentives to block online porn sites on the grounds of stopping a so-called “public health crisis.” On the other hand, state attorneys general from 23 states have filed lawsuits to stop the repeal of net neutrality rules, as have several tech companies including Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox web browser.