In the ever-evolving world of the internet, there’s always something new just around the digital corner. Right now, it’s the buzz about internet regulation changes. You might think, “Regulations? Yawn!” But wait, these updates could really shake up how we surf, share, and experience the web. Let’s unwrap this, shall we?

California governor Jerry Brown signed a new California net neutrality law into law yesterday (yes, on a Sunday, September 30th), and on that same Sunday, hours later, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against California’s new net neutrality law, saying that it “unlawfully imposes burdens on the Federal Government’s deregulatory approach to the Internet.”

As the frenzy over the FCC’s December 14, 2017 vote on whether to repeal the Open Internet Order (OIO), which is being equated to the end of Net Neutrality, reaches a fevered pitch, here’s what the average Internet user needs to know. In our view, the furor over the possible (some say inevitable) repeal is akin to the Y2K hysteria, and the actual outcome probably just as anticlimactic. The sky is not going to fall.

If you go just about anywhere online today, September 10th, 2014, you will find yourself encountering all sorts of banners and graphics of spinning disks (or spinning discs, take your pick), that exhort you to affix your name to a petition to support net neutrality.

A Federal court this week rejected network neutrality by striking down a series of government rules and regulations designed to make sure that Internet service providers could not give some Internet services bandwidth priority, while degrading that of other services. The rules had been upheld by an FCC ruling, which the court overturned.

Tech news and forums this week have been overrun by chatter about the legislative proposal for net neutrality that Verizon and Google jointly released on Monday. The proposal, which both Google and Verizon posted to their blogs at 1:38 p.m. EST and 1:47 p.m. EST, respectively, was, they say, intended to spark discussion, and spark discussion it did. If your head is spinning with this week’s discussions of network neutrality, wireline, wireless, a private Internet, and “differentiated online services”, read on.

Is your ISP interfering with your downloading and your bandwidth? If you are legitimately using a torrent service, is your ISP interfering with your connections by doing some peer-to-peer busting? Or, maybe, is your ISP is limiting or even disconnecting your VoIP calls, such as if you use Vonage, or even Skype? How would you know? By using Switzerland, the new Net Neutrality-sniffing program from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).