The European Parliament has ruled that internet service providers (ISPs) will not be allowed to force date-intensive services to pay more to use their service, an act which would have inevitably led to higher costs for the consumer, therefore making today a very good day for Netflix members and users of similarly huge online services.
The absence of net neutrality essentially means that ISPs can charge the companies behind large online services, such as Netflix, more money for more bandwidth, with these costs then potentially being reflected in the amount that subscribers of said services would be charged. There’s also a major possibility that competing online companies could block one another, thus inevitably leading to some sort of e-apocalyptic wasteland.
This ruling means that European ISPs will have to uphold net neutrality, though the same cannot be said for the US, where the same ruling was dismissed last year and has therefore led to Netflix being forced to pay more to offer its customers the same experience. Hopefully this changes at some point in the near future.
