FCC likely to vote on proposed rules for net neutrality in February

As the debate over net neutrality issue is becoming hot day-by-day, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is mulling over conducting voting next month on framing the rules to govern Internet service providers like Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and others, and how they deal with the content flow on their high-speed networks.

FCC spokesperson Kim Hart on Friday said that a five-member agency panel will be considering the proposal from Chairman Tom Wheeler on the so-called rules on net neutrality.

Hart, however, not revealed any details of the draft proposal on net neutrality.

President Barack Obama has asked the federal regulator to bring the Internet service providers (ISPs) under the ambit of same set of rules as imposed on the telecom companies 80 years ago.

The main motive behind framing the rules for ISPs and regulate them is to protect the purpose of net neutrality, which is a concept to bring equality and provide equal access to networks to all online traffic.

According to the web experts, the outcome of the FCC voting could largely affect the prices that the consumers have to pay for accessing the Internet facility for availing the content of news, entertainment and other online services.

Elaborating more about the idea behind net neutrality, the experts said that the motive is to provide every online user with equal access to all legal content on web, likemusic, video, email, photos, maps and social networks.

But the Internet service providers completely deny any such regulation. According to them, the regulations would prevent them from recovering some part of the costs for connecting to the content providers that use massive broadband quantities like Netflix.