**Supposedly**
Without Net Neutrality ISPs can throttle or block or deny service to any website or person they see fit or give websites preferential treatment.
There was a lot of gnashing of teeth when it was overturned in 2017 saying that ISPs would do all those things described above…..and it never happened. Regulating something for the sake of regulating is kinda pointless when there’s nothing to actually regulate.
This court decision is one of the first times I’ve seen where the Chevron deference Supreme Court decision has determined the outcome. Government agencies can’t simply change rules unless it’s spelled out in the letter of the law.
Going one step further, supposedly what started it was that some ISPs indicated they wanted to charge websites for using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, particularly Netflix. There was some grumbling about how corrupt it looked when Obama was given like a $20M Netflix deal after his FCC instituted net neutrality. I don’t understand it enough to really have an opinion. It seems like ISPs should charge for bandwidth and if some users are using a lot of bandwidth for streaming, they should be charged for that. For places with competitive options for internet though, it seems like it would take care of itself.
that said, I’d be interested to see the politics of net neutrality today. If Elon had owned twitter during Covid, would Biden’s administration have put pressure on ISPs to throttle twitter when twitter wouldn’t agree to censor its users posting stuff the administration didn’t like about Covid? Surely if they thought of it they would have. Support for net neutrality might look different if it was seen as protecting against government coerced censorship.
