At least, language in a bill currently in play at the US Senate would allow that interpretation.
The cybersecurity bill making its way through the Senate right now is so broad that it could allow ISPs to classify Netflix as a "cyber threat," which would allow them to throttle the streaming service's delivery to customers.
That's because high-bandwidth users inevitably make less bandwidth available for other users. To the brain-trust in the Senate, that equates to a "cybersecurity threat".
"A 'threat,' according to the bill, is anything that makes information unavailable or less available. So, high-bandwidth uses of some types of information make other types of information that go along the same pipe less available," Greg Nojeim, a lawyer with the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. "A company could, as a cybersecurity countermeasure, slow down Netflix in order to make other data going across its pipes more available to users."
It seems rather unlikely that this sort of thing is going to gather any steam, given that there are many less restrictive approaches to any perceived bandwidth problem. For one thing, we still have a glut of dark fiber in most metropolitan areas of the USA. It's already in the ground, and it's going to be more cost-effective for the existing monopolies to tag into it and boost bandwidth than it'll be to risk irking their customers. As an example, in Portland, Comcast is the dominant ISP; holding a more or less de-facto monopoly in large portions of the Metro area.
Yet, there are still options: CenturyLink fiber optic around this neighborhood, FIOS in others, and if you get really ticked off, you can go with a larger DirecTV dish with three tranceivers for satellite internet. Granted, sat's not that great, but it's far better than it used to be in terms of speed and reliability. Moreover, it's almost a given that other options will be available in the not-too-distant future: does anybody actually believe that Netflix and other streaming services aren't going to cut deals for inclusion into the cable/satellite markets?
There's a lot of hand-wring going on over the latest bill, but it's unnecessary.
