10 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 293 2018 the content provided by such organizations is important to the R&E community. The small organization’s web server might well be running on a machine at someone’s residence. If these kinds of organizations are using relatively inexpensive consumer connections, they may find that they cannot stream video material off the server, or that the video material is throttled. This might also apply to file-transfer archives or other kinds of bandwidth- and latency- sensitive materials. Limited access to these sites is certainly not in the interests of the R&E community, and the small organizations that provide them have little recourse except to convert to much more expensive commercial-grade ISP contracts—if they can even obtain them. Here the issue is more abstract it is very much in the interest of the R&E community for such sites to flourish, and the elimination of net neutrality may make this much harder. It may be that the R&E community will want to reach out to some of these sites, when necessary, and offer to host them directly on R&E networks, or to provide ways to quickly move their traffic onto R&E networks. [It] will be vital to careful- ly monitor the behavior of the consumer-oriented last-mile ISPs under the new, largely unregulated, regime... Summary In the near term, there are a few obvious steps. It is the home user who is most at risk. For privacy, the R&E community needs to make VPN- based connections from home much more commonplace. And it will be vital to carefully monitor the behavior of the consumer-oriented last-mile ISPs under the new, largely unregulated, regime, and to be prepared to take action as necessary. Endnote 1 Note that the Trump-era Federal Communications Commission has indulged in a great deal of manipulation and fabrication of data to try to argue that there is actually a genuine competitive marketplace
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