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Hi and welcome to CNet's Inside Scoop.
I'm Bridget Carey with Maggie Reardon.
And the FCC has just voted to support net neutrality regulation but things don't change over night.
So we're here to look at what is next in the battle for net neutrality.
What do you see as being next?
Well first of all the rules are really just to keep in place the internet that we all know and love today.
It's just to preserve this whole idea of openness on the internet so you're not gonna notice anything tomorrow when you go to your favorite website because nothing's gonna have changed.
All this is doing is making sure that your broadband provider.
Isn't gonna be able to block or slow down your traffic.
There aren't gonna be any fast lanes on the internet where Netflix for example has to pay extra to access customers any faster.
So it'll be the same old Internet you've always known.
Well, how long will it take for the rules to be in effect?
Well there are some prefaces that have to happen, just some sort of managerial type things.
So the FCC has to publish the order to the federal register and once it's done that which could take a couple of weeks.
Then the regulations in effect.
Well, until some one decides to sue them.
I mean, it's been known that AT&T and Verizon and some other friends want to you know, take this to court.
Yeah, absolutely, and, and they probably will once it's filed in the federal register, I would expect the lawsuits to be pouring in.
But it's going to take a while for those to play out.
You know, I think that they'll, they'll ask the courts to, to sort of invalidate the rules while the proceedings are going on, but I have a feeling the courts won't accept that.
They didn't in the last time that Verizon sued the FCC over it's older rules in 2010.
So you know, we can expect these rules to, to go into place.
But we're gonna have these court challenges to look at, and so the issue doesn't go away.
But they're probably gonna be fighting for at least a couple of years.
So if it's tied up in court for several years, there's a new President that's gonna be coming in 2016.
Could they hire a new FCC chair and just stop all this as it's, you know, going on right now?
Could it all be reversed?>>Yeah, it could.
And, in fact, you know it, it's very likely that, once the court decisions are all decided, Chairman Tom Wheeler.
Won't be there anymore.
And it will be someone else.
And if it's a Republican administration you're gonna have a Republican FCC, they'll have three votes on the FCC and Democrats will have two.
It'll be the mirror image of what we have today.
And yeah, they could do a lot of things.
They could get rid of the regulation.
You know, there's also the.
The flip of side.
If we have a democratic administration and you have a democratic FCC, they way impose some of the more stringent regulation that the Republicans are afraid of under this new classification of broadband.
And you know, so people are a little.
Weary about that too, so we don't know what's going to happen.
And just to review, the big argument that the broadband providers are making, that the reason that they want to sue.
Why are the so upset with this?
Well, the big reason they're upset, is because, you know, everybody pretty much agrees on these rules for openness, everybody likes an open internet.
What the don't like is that the FCC is basing these rules on, regulation that was really drafted for the old telephone network.
And so they say it's going to regulate the internet like a utility.
And there are all kinds of provision such as taxes and tariffs.
And what they call unbundling which makes them have to share their infrastructure with competitors they don't like.
And so the FCC has said well we're gonna forebear on a lot of these things or basically ignore those regulations that don't apply but ya know, the devil will be in the details in terms of how they write it because a lot of the Republicans are saying.
Well, what about future FCC's?
Could they decide not to forebear and then we have to deal with all this added regulation?
And that might happen.
Well, I guess we'll have to just see how this plays out.
Thank you Maggie.
I'm Bridget Carrie, thank you for joining us on the CNet inside scoop
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