President-elect Donald Trump picked two net neutrality opponents on Monday to oversee the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) transition team.
Trump appointed Mark Jamison and Jeffrey Eisenach, to oversee his administration's FCC and telecommunications policy agenda. Both Jamison and Eisenach are staunch opponents of net neutrality.
The appointees
Eisenbach, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former paid consultant of Verizon Wireless have already been on board since October, the announcement only formalizes his role in the transition. Jamison, a professor at the University of Florida and a former Sprint lobbyist, has long been a critic of the FCC under Chairman Tom Wheeler, according to The Verge.
Both Jamison and Eisenach are vocal adversaries who worked hard to prevent the FCC from passing rules on net neutrality last year. With the appointment of the men as overseers to the FCC, the FCC's net neutrality rules enacted in 2015 under the Obama administration is now in peril of being rolled back.
FCC Ruling
The FCC's Open Internet Order (2015) decreed that Internet Service Providers (ISP) does not have the authority to discriminate between various types of content on the internet. Simply put, the ISPs cannot charge extra to companies using the internet for their services to route their traffic on the "fast lane" while relegating those who cannot pay or refuse to, to the "slow lanes," according to Forbes.
The FCC rules assured that all traffic passing through the ISPs cables are all on an equal playing field, it effectively barred providers from blocking or throttling web traffic, or prioritizing select content to those who can pay to be in the "fast lane."
The implications
Historically speaking ISPs have always opposed net neutrality, while streaming services and tech companies are all in support. They say that limiting net neutrality poses a grave threat to the internet and that prioritizing paid content over others undermines the innovation that made the internet.
Trump during the campaign promised to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger citing big media companies already had too much power, but even if that merger is blocked, AT&T and companies like it will still benefit from scrapping the FCC Rules by starting to price-gouge customers for content consumption.
