Net neutrality update August 2017

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a two week extension to the deadlines for comments in relation to its Restoring Internet Freedom Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) until 30th August 2017. The Hill and Ars Technica reported on the huge number of comments received by the FCC; more than 20 million were made in total. Ars Technica also reported on an analysis suggesting  that the majority of people who wrote unique comments want the FCC to keep rather than repeal its current net neutrality rules.

Cnet and Wired reported on Apple’s submission to the FCC, its first significant public statement on net neutrality. Wired’s coverage suggests Apple’s decision to comment is indicative of its development beyond a hardware company into new areas such as streaming video, with net neutrality principles being important in preventing competitors from throttling or preventing access to its content.

Further to July’s update, Ars Technica reported that Verizon has commenced “throttling video streams to resolutions as low as 480p on smartphones this week. Most data plans will get 720p video on smartphones, but customers won't have any option to completely un-throttle video. 1080p will be the highest resolution provided on tablets”. This is in relation to the Verizon Unlimited service; from Verizon’s press release: “Video on Go Unlimited is DVD-quality (SD on phones (480p) and HD on tablets (720p)), while video on Beyond Unlimited is HD for phones and tablets (720p for phones; 1080p for tablets).  Moving forward, HD video on all legacy plans will also match Beyond Unlimited’s HD quality. We're doing this to ensure all customers have a great experience on our network since there is no visible difference in quality on a smartphone or tablet when video is shown at higher resolutions (than 720p on phones and 1080p on tablets).”