It grants broadband companies the power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has voted to dismantle Net Neutrality, the rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the Internet, granting broadband companies the power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences.

Tim Erlin, VP of Product Management & Strategy at Tripwire, said: "The removal of net neutrality is likely to decrease transparency on the Internet, and less transparency will increase cybersecurity threats. As ISPs implement different behaviors for managing, filtering and altering content, we’re going to develop towards a bunch of different internets, instead of one Internet.

"It may not be at the forefront of the net neutrality debate, but these changes will ultimately increase the attack surface available to criminals. If ISPs are no longer required to pass traffic unaltered, they can simply stop end-to-end encryption entirely.

"Why wouldn’t an ISP charge businesses and individuals more for supporting encrypted traffic? The loss of net neutrality can easily make security a premium service. It may not be the first impact, but losing net neutrality opens up the possibility of ISPs mining previously encrypted traffic for valuable data."