Internet Service Providers ISPs

An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is the company that connects an end user to the internet and to the websites and services they access. When you pay for a home broadband package, or for a mobile data plan on your phone, that payment buys you a connection. The ISP supplies it: it carries your requests out to a website and brings that website's content back to your screen.

Standing in the middle

An ISP sits between the customer and the content. Every request you make travels through the ISP's network before it reaches the site you asked for, and the reply comes back through the ISP too. For example, when a games console downloads a large update for a multiplayer game, the request for that file passes through equipment owned by the ISP before it reaches the game company's server, and the ISP chooses which path that data takes across its own network.

Because the ISP is in the middle, it is technically able to control how content is delivered to different customers. It can decide how data is routed across its network and how quickly that data reaches each customer, so it could let one service load quickly while holding another back. That power over access to online services is why net neutrality matters.

The connection, not the content

The ISP is not the website or the content provider. If you use your ISP to reach a site full of guitar tutorials, the ISP does not own those tutorials, write them or decide how the site presents them; it only provides the connection that gets you there.