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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.
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.
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.