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Rollback of Net Neutrality Has Small Businesses Worried - The New York Times

posted onNovember 23, 2017
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Article snippet: David Callicott needs to be online to run his small company, GoodLight Natural Candles in San Francisco. Dozens of orders from wholesale customers like Whole Foods and Bed Bath & Beyond are relayed online each day to fulfillment warehouses, which send out Mr. Callicott’s paraffin-free candles. The GoodLight website accounts for 15 percent of its sales, which could reach $1.5 million this year; the e-commerce behemoth Amazon makes up another 10 percent. And many of the company’s business documents are stored in cloud-based data centers. But the costs of doing business on the internet may be about to rise. A proposal on Tuesday by the Federal Communications Commission would undo so-called net neutrality rules that barred high-speed internet service providers from adjusting website delivery speeds and charging customers extra for access. Without those regulations, GoodLight and other smaller businesses fear they may not have a level digital playing field to compete against deep-pocketed industry giants that could pay to get an edge online. “For such an analog product, we’re heavily reliant on the digital world and the internet for our day-to-day operations,” said Mr. Callicott, who helped found the company nearly eight years ago and now works with three other full-time employees. “The internet, the speed of it, our entire business revolves around that.” The regulations, established by the F.C.C. in 2015, have heavyweights on both sides of the debate. Internet gi... Link to the full article to read more

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