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California Senate Votes To Restore Net Neutrality (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The California Senate voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that would reinstate the net neutrality regulations repealed by the Federal Communications Commission in December. The bill, S.B. 822, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), was introduced in March and passed through three committees, all along party-lines. The bill was approved 23-12 and will now head to the state Assembly. The bill would reinstate rules similar to those in the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order. It forbids ISPs from throttling or blocking online content and requires them to treat all internet traffic equally. But the bill also takes the original rules further by specifically banning providers from participating in some types of "zero-rating" programs, in which certain favored content doesn't contribute to monthly data caps. If the bill goes on to pass in the Assembly, providers will no longer be able to obtain government contracts in the state of California without obeying the regulations.
..no, that's not what it's about, it's about T-Mobile and AT&T prioritizing Netflix and DirecTV traffic over all other traffic, or, alternately, slowing all over traffic intentionally in favor of Netflix/DirecTV. It's also about throttling or blocking competitors' traffic as it traverses their networks (i.e. you're a Comcast/Xfinity customer trying to access some site that is hosted by AT&T, and Comcast/Xfinity slows or even blocks access -- or vice-versa). It's also about not allowing ISPs to create the 'Walled Gardens' you've heard mentioned before (i.e. 'tiered service') where you'd have to pay extra to access some areas of the Internet; example: you're a Comcast/Xfinity customer, and you want to watch something on Netflix. You find you can't access it at all unless you pay Comcast/Xfinity extra on your bill every month. That's what Net Neutrality laws are intended to prevent. Essentially, without them, the big ISPs could chop up the Internet. If it was bad enough, they could even break it in significant ways. That's why it's important to stop them from doing that.