As of last month, it’s legal for Verizon, AT&T or any other service provider to block your blog, The Source, or any other website.

Remember all the anti-censorship crusades that took place in 2012, when the Internet was threatened with SOPA?

While we were talking about current events the last few weeks, there was a big one that we missed:  the need to raise concerns over censorship and Internet freedoms.

No, it’s not an episode of The Walking Dead–SOPA hasn’t been resurrected.

The current cause for concern is what is known as “network neutrality” or “net neutrality” for short.

It’s basically what keeps the Internet an open, equal space.

If not for net neutrality, your service provider would have full control over what content you’re able to see.

Net neutrality is a legal principle that would make it unlawful for cable and phone companies like AT&T, Sprint, Bright House, and Comcast to block some websites and/or give priority to others.

It keeps the Internet service providers (ISPs) and cable companies from playing favorites or forcing you to only use services offered by them, as opposed to free market.

For example, net neutrality is what prevents Verizon from blocking access to Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, or any competitor’s website to ensure you can’t check out the competition.

It’s what prevents AT&T from charging Fox News extra for a special service that would make their website load more quickly than CNN’s.

Imagine if Bright House wanted to block Netflix, forcing you to get cable.

Or if MySpace struck a deal with a cable company to block Twitter and Facebook.

While those scenarios may sound far-fetched, they’re actually legally possible as of January 14, 2014, when a D.C. Appeals Court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt at adopting net neutrality rules for the second time in four years.

The court ruled in favor of Verizon versus the FCC, saying that Verizon and other ISPs do not have to treat all traffic equally.

The court struck down the two most important net neutrality rules that the FCC proposed: one that prevented discrimination in favor of or against websites; the other against outright blocking.

Without the adoption of net neutrality rules, Internet censorship would become entirely possible–and a likely reality.

The good news is that the D.C. Appeals Court didn’t reject the net neutrality rules because of their content, but instead because of the fact that ISPs and cable companies are not classified as “telecommunications services,” which means the FCC has no authority to regulate them.

They are classified as “information sharing services.”

However, the court also stated that the FCC has the authority to reclassify them as such so that the FCC can enforce net neutrality rules.

Within two weeks of the court ruling, a petition with over a million signatures was delivered to FCC leadership, imploring them to reclassify ISP and cable companies.

In the meantime, just this month, Congressional Democrats in both houses proposed legislation to essentially keep net neutrality rules as they are until the FCC has a chance to act on last month’s court decision.

If enacted, the bill, dubbed the ”Open Internet Preservation Act of 2014,” would delay the enforcement of the D.C. Court’s decision, keeping net neutrality safe–for now.

Tom Wheeler, the Chairman of the FCC, said in a press conference held earlier today that he plans to announce the FCC’s new plan for net neutrality “in the coming days.”

We’ll keep you posted on the new updates as they come.

 

April Dawn (@scarlettsinatra)