This comes after proponents of net neutrality, like Stanford Law Professor Barbara Van Schewick and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), had called out the rules for leaving room for 5G fast lanes within the draft rules. Fast lanes are made feasible by a technical feature of the 5G network called network slicing— which allows telcos to create a virtualized subnetwork (called a ‘slice’) for a dedicated purpose. “While draft order acknowledges that some speeding up of apps could violate the no-throttling rule, it added some unclear, nebulous language suggesting that the FCC would review any fast lanes case-by-case, without explaining how it would do that,” Van Schewick had said in a blog post explaining the issue present in the draft rules.
The FCC voted in favor of re-introducing net neutrality in the US on April 25, but it didn’t release the final order till May 7. The order mentions that many, including Van Schewick, had written to the FCC expressing concern about the issues that would arise if telecom companies sped up the internet for certain kinds of content/service providers. “‘[b]eing put in a slow lane by an ISP has the exact same effect as being left out of a fast lane by an ISP,’ and that ‘[s]tartups needs to be protected from both’,” Van Schewick had mentioned in her letter to the FCC.