California Bill Would Restore, Strengthen Net Neutrality Protections (mercurynews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: With the FCC order to repeal net neutrality rules set to take effect next week, a bill that would restore those regulations in California will get its first hearing Tuesday (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). SB 822, written by State Sen. Scott D. Wiener, D-San Francisco, is backed by big names including Tom Wheeler, the Obama-appointed former Federal Communications Commission chairman who wrote the 2015 Open Internet Order. Wheeler is joined by former FCC commissioners Michael Copps and Gloria Tristani in advocating for SB 822, which would in some ways be stronger than the net neutrality rules put in place under President Obama's administration after more than a decade of legal and political wrangling. Those rules required equal treatment of all internet traffic, and prohibited the establishment of internet slow and fast lanes. Wiener's bill would also prohibit "zero rating," in which internet providers exempt certain content, sites and services from data caps. In addition, it would prohibit public agencies in the state from signing contracts with ISPs that violate net neutrality principles, and call for internet service providers to be transparent about their practices and offerings.

Comments

You're welcome

[PopeRatzo]

California: showing the rest of the US how to do it since 1850.

Re:You're welcome

[DCFusor]

And FWIW as an actual conservative (rather than some alt-right wing nut) - I'm all for the kind of net neutrality Wheeler surprised us with. I'm old enough to remember all kinds of fearful comments about Wheeler here and on Ars (and Groklaw) because of his cable lobbyist background.
Seems some people need to remember that politics is the entertainment branch of the military industrial complex - on a good day.

Re:You're welcome

[PopeRatzo]

Isn't California on the verge of going broke and taxing itself to death?

No. California has a big budget surplus.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/j...

According to some reports the ISPs

[H3lldr0p]

are shitting themselves in fear and have begun dumping a ton of lobbying money into the capital. They've likely screwed themselves much as they did in court before the FCC dropped their action against them. By arguing out both sides of their mouth and also through their ass, they've put themselves into the unenviable position of dealing with a patchwork of laws instead of a single set of regulations. It's not as if this was an unforeseen outcome. It's quite the opposite given public opinion on the issue.

However, for reasons of nothing but plain insatiable greed the biggest ISPs decided to try anyway.

Re:Glad California joining WA and OR

[Anonymous Coward]

Flyover states just believe what they are told to believe by Fox News and political talk radio.

Net Neutrality is un-American, anti-Capitalist, socialistic and something that Obama Liberals losers created. Therefore; they hate it.

The Bill is in Danger of Being Seriously Weakened

[Puk]

A Senate committee recommended serious cuts to the bill:
https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2018/04/california-senate-committee-recommends-cutting-key-net-neutrality-protections

And, of course, the ISPs have been fighting the bill _hard_:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/att-and-cable-lobby-are-terrified-of-a-california-net-neutrality-bill/

If you're in CA and you support effective net neutrality legislation, let your local legislators know you want the original bill.

What's wrong with zero rating?

[viperidaenz]

It's worked quite well in NZ before.

Currently we have zero rating available for mobile customers, you can buy a "socialiser" pack for your mobile plan, so Facebook et al. don't count towards your data caps.

Many many years ago I had a cable plan where NZ traffic was counted at 10%, so if you used local services (back in the day where DC++ was popular) and you effectively had 10x your data limit. Most local traffic between ISPs went through free peer exchanges while international traffic was costly for ISP's.

I'm sure there are ISP's that offer other zero rating plans for the likes of TV streaming.

I guess it would be different if an ISP had a monopoly in any area, but wholesale and retail has been split by with government regulation. Any ISP can serve any customer, whether it's via DSL or Fibre. It's only wireless ISP's that run their physical networks.

Re:What's wrong with zero rating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if everyone does it then in order to get to the real internet you have to pay a lot of money.

As a customer you end up paying your contract (with a tiny data cap), plus the "social" bundle for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the "entertainment" bundle for Netflix, Hulu and Spotify, the "navigation" bundle for Google Maps, and the "information" bundle for Google Search, Bing and Yahoo.

If you want to use wikipedia, well that comes out of your general data cap. Same if you want to use Hulu or Foursquare or dischord. They have to pay the ISP to be included in the right bundle, see, and you have to pay the ISP for that bundle.

But wait, there's more fun: in a lot of countries, the companies who own the internet access area also media companies. So if I want to watch Sky Sports on-demand then hooray, that's zero-rated! But if I want to watch the BBC sports coverage, that will cost me.

The whole "net neutrality" thing isn't about network performance or peering agreements. There are already plenty of ISP-level mechanisms in place to mitigate having to pull data across continents (lots of content companies offer to supply local caches of their data to national ISPs for just this purpose). Net neutrality is about stopping data network operators from being able to control which specific services people can use (by making their own/their partner's services free/much cheaper than competitors) and to charge twice for the same bandwidth (you and the content company). In the USA it's particularly egregious, because they are actually demanding to be allowed to charge three times: once to the customer, once to the content supplier and once to the government who already paid tens of billions in subsidies to build out networks to make bandwidth available to connect customers and suppliers, which the telecoms monopolies spent on dividends and bonuses instead. That US broadband customers have extremely limited or zero choice of providers just means that the providers can abuse the shit out of them, and there is literally nothing the customer can do short of moving house or doing without the internet.