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Net Neutrality Makes Comeback in California; Lawmakers Agree To Strict Rules (arstechnica.com)
California lawmakers announced a deal Thursday to restore key protections in a widely watched bill to give Californians strong net neutrality protections. From a report: The California net neutrality bill that could impose the toughest rules in the country is being resurrected. The bill was approved in its strongest form by the California Senate, but was then gutted by the State Assembly's communications committee, which approved the bill only after eliminating provisions opposed by AT&T and cable lobbyists. Bill author Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) has been negotiating with Communications Committee Chairman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) and other lawmakers since then, and announced the results today. Wiener said the agreement with Santiago and other lawmakers resulted in "legislation implementing the strongest net neutrality protections in the nation." A fact sheet distributed by Wiener's office today said the following: Under this agreement, SB 822 will contain strong net neutrality protections and prohibit blocking websites, speeding up or slowing down websites or whole classes of applications such as video, and charging websites for access to an ISP's subscribers or for fast lanes to those subscribers. ISPs will also be prohibited from circumventing these protections at the point where data enters their networks and from charging access fees to reach ISP customers. SB 822 will also ban ISPs from violating net neutrality by not counting the content and websites they own against subscribers' data caps. This kind of abusive and anti-competitive "zero rating", which leads to lower data caps for everyone, would be prohibited, while "zero-rating" plans that don't harm consumers are not banned.
Did they make an allowance for peering agreements? Technically that would speed up some websites.
This is what legitimate policy-making looks like: draft an actual law, argue for it, put it up to a vote of elected representatives, if it passes, get it signed, then implement it.
Note how this is different than having an unelected board just make up rules that sound good.
Once again, it's up to California to show the rest of the country how it's done.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Finally California does something right in it's government, assuming the full regulations are as clear as are stated in the summary. Take those exact words and make it federal law.
SB 822 will also ban ISPs from violating net neutrality by not counting the content and websites they own against subscribers' data caps. This kind of abusive and anti-competitive "zero rating", which leads to lower data caps for everyone, would be prohibited, while "zero-rating" plans that don't harm consumers are not banned.
How can you tell the difference between 'good' "zero-rating" and 'bad' "zero-rating"?
Ken
How are cable/telecom companies going to possibly argue that the FCC's rule preempts this when the FCC stated rather bluntly in the order repealing net neutrality that they were doing it because they do not believe the FCC has the authority to impose those regulations. The Constitution is quite clear that any power not claimed by the federal government defaults to the states. So if the federal government is abdicating responsibility for regulating telecom and cable companies, it means the states are free to do so.
You would think that after the first debacle with Verizon suing and getting everyone classified as Title II carriers would have taught the industry to be careful what they wish for. Now instead of one consistent rule across the entire country they have to contend with as many as 50 different sets of rules.
All your West is belong to Freedom.
It's only in the Lie-over states that you are treated like Serfs.
Wait .. Serfs had rights.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The ISPs will not be able to discriminate based on content. They can still discriminate based on customer usage. If my neighbor is downloading full blast 24/7 I don't care if it is Netflix, Linux distributions, Steam games, or just a horrendous number of regular web pages; data is data. The ISP can still just slow down the user that is eating up the bandwidth. What they cannot do is throttle based on the source. Otherwise, you get a world where all the bandwidth goes to the streams from the cable company website that just happens to be the ISPs parent company, but limited bandwidth for everyone else because they are competitors.
The previous Slashdot story where the bill was gutted linked to a diff of the bill. This article just makes statements about "strong protections." I really like having access to the source code.
the jobs will just move out of CA WI is open to do any thing to get jobs.
The Feds have jurisdiction. Ergo, this NN is basically bollocks and will get struck down.
Unless of course Dems get an unassailable majority in the mid-terms and reinstate in some form NN.
It's not the fault of your neighbor that your bandwidth is impacted. It's the fault of the ISP for not building it's infrastructure enough to handle users actually using all their available bandwidth.
My wife and I wanted to spice up our marriage a bit so we decided I should watch her have sex with another man. He's coming over later tonight to fuck her and then he'll finish in my mouth (a fantasy of mine). I'm getting a littler nervous about it though. Any advice?
Who knew Donald J. Trump posted to /. ?
Just as Putin cums, bite down hard. He likes that. It's very manly.
~ Never forget: Miguel Santiago is bought and paid for.
Currently cable and at&t both cap at 1024gb in Calfiornia. That's NOT enough data to stream 4k! The cap needs to be 4TB MINIMUM.
Not saying that the danger your suggest won't manifest without some of this legislation, but it is disingenuous to deny that lower utilization users don't subsidize the higher utilization users.
Since we can't now say, "Those greedy folks over at Netflix are relying on other people's networks for their business model to work at all and we're going to treat them accordingly", it means that everybody has to pay into the pool that gives them this free ride.
Zero-rating that doesn't harm consumers is not banned? So as long as it doesn't purposely deliver malware? If consumers are using the site you can assume they are doing it willingly and that they are not willingly harming themselves.
Is it as strong as Trumpy's Tarrif act's?? ...as powerful as the world it self?
as powerful as trumpy himself?
As strong as msmash's Breath?
As powerful as msmash's intelligence?
I doubt it.. CA is messed up, unmanageable, ungovernable, and this is FAKE.
No, nothing in the summary suggested anything of that sort. Nothing is stopping ISPs from charging heavy users for their heavy use, just as they can now. But once the user pays for their service, the ISP is obligated to provide the service. They don't get to double-dip by claiming that the payment they already accepted was insufficient and that the sender needs to pony up the difference if they want that data to arrive in a timely fashion. That's called extortion. If FedEx and Amazon agree to a contract and you then order something from Amazon, FedEx doesn't get to hustle you for money in order to deliver the package on time. They got paid to do the job and now they need to do it.
Moreover, contrary to your suggestion, this actually ensures that we DON'T end up subsidizing others. Without safeguards like these, the fees that ISPs like Comcast were trying to charge services like Netflix will inevitably be passed on to users by those services, at which point users on well-behaved ISPs (i.e. ones that don't charge these fees) will end up subsidizing the people stuck with misbehaving ISPs. Either that, or Netflix will have to add something like a Comcast Surcharge for its users who are stuck with misbehaving ISPs.
Someone ends up paying either way, but if these fees represent increased costs of business incurred by these ISPs, then the only proper thing to do is to increase the amount that they charge their customers (and accept the PR hit for having high prices), rather than illicitly trying to hide the costs by demanding that third-parties pay them for a job they had already accepted payment to do.
You need to stop thinking about constitutionality or who-is-responsible-for-what. Those considerations are 100% distraction. If you want to make sense of FCC decisions, then you need to look at it in terms of the FCC's current purpose.
The FCC's purpose is to maximize profit for whoever pays Pai. The FCC does not have the power to implement NN because the people who bribe Pai want it to prevent NN. The FCC does have the power to prevent states from implementing NN, because the people who bribe Pai want it to prevent NN. The FCC also has the power and responsibility to suck your dick .. if you pay Pai.
Someone ends up paying either way
Exactly. And guess who ain't paying for using a third of all the internet's bandwidth? Netflix. Which means that you are, whether you actually watch it or not.
Trump made a big point of 'giving power back to the States', so I guess we'll wait and see if he's going to keep his word (for once!) or try to stomp all over California legislation, again.
I agree. You are one sick puppy.
If FedEx and Amazon agree to a contract and you then order something from Amazon, FedEx doesn't get to hustle you for money in order to deliver the package on time.
This is great news for all the people who have had to pay extra to redirect a package that UPS is trying to deliver to a place where they aren't. UPS has been paid to deliver it already. Charging $5 to readdress it enroute is a breach of contract.
Oh, wait, as a recipient of a package I have no contract with UPS.
Without safeguards like these, the fees that ISPs like Comcast were trying to charge services like Netflix
NN has nothing to do with charging other commercial operators a fee for co-locating their servers in the ISPs data center.
Huh? ISPs in the US cannot measure the usage of customers and limit it when necessary, or even make them pay for the amount of data they transfer?
Then how were they supposed to throttle based on content if they can't even throttle based on volume?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is great news for all the people who have had to pay extra to redirect a package that UPS is trying to deliver to a place where they aren't. UPS has been paid to deliver it already. Charging $5 to readdress it enroute is a breach of contract.
Oh, wait, as a recipient of a package I have no contract with UPS.
You're actually making my point here. You're paying $5 because you're paying for something above and beyond what UPS was originally contracted to perform. You established your own contract with them to perform an additional service. What additional service was Comcast providing when it demanded extra payments? So far as I've seen, Comcast was demanding additional payments for exactly what they were already contracted to perform. If Comcast wants to charge Netflix extra to colocate or whatnot, I have no problem with that, but if their customers have already paid them to do a job, I expect them to do it, not to throttle Netflix and demand payment for the job they were already paid to do.
NN has nothing to do with charging other commercial operators a fee for co-locating their servers in the ISPs data center.
Given that Netflix wasn't colocating with Comcast in the first place when Comcast throttled them and demanded the fees I was talking about, it should be pretty obvious that I wasn't talking about colocation fees prior to your bringing them up. I agree that NN has nothing to say about colocation fees, and I'm actually perfectly fine with them, but that has no bearing on anything you were responding to.
Actually, they do pay. Historically, most of their content has been hosted on AWS, and AWS charges based on bandwidth used, among other things.
Where do people like you get these ideas?
You Neighbor should be able to use the service he paid for we have all bought into the whole unlimited thing and they should not be able to limit it in any way
... I finally have a want for it.
Bach says it all.
Your internet connection is only 1% of your internet bill and bandwidth is a fraction of that. 99% of your bill has to do with support, marketing, and administrative overhead. 90% of backbone fiber is dark, bandwidth supply has been outpacing demand for 15+ years due to technological advancements. The amount of data they can shove down fiber has increased 1000x in the past 5 years alone. Nearly the entirety of the world's peak bandwidth consumption can be put down a single fiber pair. They're already talking about 100gb to the home for nearly the same cost as what people are paying for 100Mb right now.
Madagascar has enough bandwidth to support USA's peak internet traffic.
From their bosses at cable companies, I would imagine.
AWS or not, their logic is fundamentally flawed. Nobody gets bandwidth for free. Everyone, whether it is me, you, or Netflix, pays for service from their server/laptop/phone to the Internet backbone, and they pay based on how much bandwidth they use (or, in the case of residential service, by how much bandwidth they have available divided by some fixed multiplier that is determined by the average amount of bandwidth consumers use). The backbone providers then charge money to the end-user ISPs for transit over their networks. This is proportional to the amount of bandwidth that those ISPs use.
The problem is that Comcast is simply too large. They have control over an ever-expanding percentage of residential Internet customers in the United States, and they are abusing that near-monopoly to extort money out of companies in exchange for access to their users.
The easiest way to explain this is with a postal service analogy. If I send a letter to Netflix, I pay for a stamp that pays the postal service. If they send me back a letter, they pay for a stamp that pays the postal service. Netflix bundles the cost of that stamp into their service cost, so I end up paying it indirectly, but they still paid the cost of postage. Comcast charging money to Netflix is equivalent to my local mail carrier deciding that Netflix sends too much mail, and demanding that Netflix pay him/her an extra five cents to take the mail from the local post office to my house. See how absurd that is? Netflix would tell my postal carrier to eff off.
But suppose that postal carrier gets together with a group of postal carriers and forms a union of concerned postal workers. And suppose that group then demands ten cents for every Netflix-originated letter distributed by any of their workers. Suddenly, Netflix has to pay attention, because otherwise their letters won't get there. But Netflix already paid for their stamp, so there's no legitimate reason for them to have to pay more.
The difference, of course, is that if postal carriers did this, they would go to jail, and Comcast executives, being powerful corporate types, likely won't. But otherwise, there's really no meaningful difference.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You're actually making my point here. You're paying $5 because you're paying for something above and beyond what UPS was originally contracted to perform.
Nope. They were paid to deliver a package. They cannot deliver it to me if I am not where they are trying to deliver it. It is much cheaper for them to redirect the delivery -- to the same city, on the same truck -- than to deal with a non-delivery or a lost delivery.
What additional service was Comcast providing when it demanded extra payments?
Uhhh, electricity, network connection, air conditioning, environmental protection. Colo is not free, despite Netflix offering to provide a colocated server in Comcast's data center "for free".
If Comcast wants to charge Netflix extra to colocate or whatnot, I have no problem with that,
You do or you don't. I can't figure out.
Given that Netflix wasn't colocating with Comcast in the first place when Comcast throttled them and demanded the fees
Border congestion is not "throttling". Netflix's offer of "free colo" of one of their servers in a Comcast data center to solve the border congestion issues was met with a proper demand for payment for the colo services.
They were paid to deliver a package. They cannot deliver it to me if I am not where they are trying to deliver it.
UPS is paid to deliver to an address. If the sender opted for Signature On Delivery, UPS is being paid to deliver to a person at an address. They never agreed to deliver to you no matter where you are. The only couriers I'm aware of who will accept payment to do what you're describing are the ones who specialize in serving legal documents to hostile recipients.
Colo is not free, despite Netflix offering to provide a colocated server in Comcast's data center "for free".
Again, Comcast wasn't providing colocation, so the payments they were demanding had nothing to do with it.
Border congestion is not "throttling".
Agreed, but border congestion has nothing to do with what happened. Multiple Comcast users demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of streaming Netflix without any problem across the "congested" border link via VPN, which shouldn't have been possible if it was congested. Likewise, packets from Netflix that had been modified to indicate a different sender were shown to be able to traverse that link without issue, as were packets from entirely unrelated sites and services that also traversed that same link. In fact, no evidence for congestion was ever provided by either Comcast or any of the independent parties studying the situation.
Quite the contrary, all of the evidence that was ever presented pointed to Comcast singling out for throttling the packets that were marked as being sent by Netflix. Simple as that. Moreover, the fact that the "congestion" appeared suddenly and then disappeared the same day that Netflix ponied up the cash—even before they had begun colocating—demonstrated that the link was already more than capable of supporting the traffic, as well as that the fees Comcast was demanding were for something other than (or, at most, in addition to) colocation.
But, as with pretty much everything else you've said, whether they were throttling or congested is actually irrelevant to what I was talking about, since I was only mentioning throttling as a way to refer to when this incident started.