Brands join the fight for net neutrality

Dive Brief:

Fight for the Future announced an “Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality” for July 12 to oppose the current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plan to roll back existing new neutrality regulations, per a press release.
The effort is being supported by a coalition of companies, public interest groups and grassroots organization including brands such as Amazon, Vimeo, Mozilla, Etsy and Kickstarter. On July 12, those involved will seek to activate consumers and provide them with tools to contact Congress and the FCC.
“Net neutrality made it possible for Vimeo, along with countless other startups, to innovate and thrive. The FCC’s proposed rollback of the 2015 open internet rules threatens to impede that innovation and allow a handful of incumbent ISPs to determine winners and losers,” said Michael Cheah, general counsel, Vimeo, in a statement.

Dive Insight:

The premise of net neutrality is that internet service providers (ISPs) have to treat all internet traffic equally. Without regulations in place, ISPs could be the arbiters of what traffic gets priority and possibly create a new marketplace where companies like Netflix or Amazon would have to pay a fee or have their traffic slowed down over an ISPs pipeline.

Amazon's participation in the day of action, in particular, is noteworthy because it can potentially reach a large number of consumers who enjoy the platform's video content and encourage them to act to ensure fast delivery of the streaming content. Other participants include Reddit, Mozilla, GitHub and Credo Mobile as well as a number of organizations like Center for Media Justice, Creative Commons, Greenpeace, ACLU and Daily Kos.

Major ISPs, such as AT&T and Verizon, welcome the idea of rolling back net neutrality regulation because of the potential for a new secondary market, but at the same time there is an overwhelming potential for conflict as both of those ISPs are building out content strategies within company divisions such as DirecTV for AT&T and AOL with Verizon. Rolling back net neutrality would give those ISPs a direct competitive advantage over Netflix, Amazon Prime and other over-the-top (OTT) video services.

The issue isn’t limited to OTT services, and the range of Fight for the Future’s coalition illustrates the number of parties willing to fight for net neutrality.