The fight over Internet neutrality pits technology titans against each other in a battle to the death — or more likely to the courts anyway.
The Federal Communications Commission's new rules treat the Internet like a public utility and forbid Internet service providers from charging content providers extra to speed transmission of their content.
Not surprisingly the service providers oppose the new rules, while the content companies support them.
"On one hand, you have the Internet companies like Netflix and Facebook who are trying to ensure they have unfettered access to the consumer and that the consumer has unfettered access to them," star media analyst Craig Moffett of Moffett Research
told CNBC.
"And on the other hand, you have companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast who are saying they don't oppose any of the net neutrality-related rules, but the legal framework in order to get there imposes all these burdensome regulations and the risk of government overreach."
The latter companies fear price regulation, he notes.
The FCC's 3-2 vote, along party lines, will likely draw a legal appeal from telecommunications and cable companies. The agency hasn't fared too well in the courts with net neutrality,
The Wall Street Journal explains.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit overruled the FCC in 2010 after it sanctioned Comcast for delaying traffic for users of file sharing sites such as BitTorrent. The same court granted Verizon a victory in ruling against the agency’s effort to create Open Internet rules.
Not everyone thinks the issue of net neutrality is the end-all and be-all. "Net neutrality only bans the idea of slow lanes and fast lanes, which is an incremental amount of revenue," Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu, who coined the term "net neutrality,"
told CNBC.
"On the margin, there's a tiny bit of revenue that might be lost, but the main income just comes from the regular business model."
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