David Callicott needs to be online to run his small company, GoodLight Natural Candles in San Francisco.
Dozens of orders from wholesale customers like Whole Foods and Bed Bath & Beyond are relayed online each day to fulfillment warehouses, which send out Mr.
Callicott’s paraffin-free candles. The GoodLight website accounts for 15 percent of its sales, which could reach $1.5 million this year; the e-commerce behemoth Amazon makes up another 10 percent. And many of the company’s business documents are stored in cloud-based data centers.But the costs of doing business on the internet may be about to rise.
A proposal on Tuesday by the Federal Communications Commission would undo so-called net neutrality rules that barred high-speed internet service providers from adjusting website delivery speeds and charging customers extra for access.
Without those regulations, GoodLight and other smaller businesses fear they may not have a level digital playing field to compete against deep-pocketed industry giants that could pay to get an edge online.
“For such an analog product, we’re heavily reliant on the digital world and the internet for our day-to-day operations,” said Mr. Callicott, who helped found the company nearly eight years ago and now works with three other full-time employees. “The internet, the speed of it, our entire business revolves around that.”
The regulations, established by the F.C.C. in 2015, have heavyweights on both sides of the debate.
Internet giants like Google and Amazon say that net neutrality preserves free speech; telecom titans like AT&T and Verizon warn that the existing rules put a chokehold on free-market commerce. In a blog post on Tuesday, Comcast’s chief executive, David N. Watson, wrote that his company “does not and will not block, throttle, or discriminate against lawful content.”Internet service providers say that the proposal would lead to a better variety of services for online customers and more innovation in the industry.
For small businesses, a rollback could fundamentally change how, and whether, they do business. Many started online or turned to e-commerce to expand their thin margins.
“Things are already difficult enough as it is for a small businesses,” Mr. Callicott said. “You’re busy enough just keeping your company running, trying to grow and succeed or just stay alive, that you don’t have the resources or the time to contemplate how to prepare for something like this.”
In the United States, 99.7 percent of all businesses have fewer than 500 employees, according to government statistics. Of…
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