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Massachusetts Proposes Public Shaming of Net Neutrality Violators (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNET:
Massachusetts plans to protect net neutrality by naming and shaming internet service providers that don't adhere to open internet principles. Lawmakers in the state Senate have proposed a bill (S2160) that would create an "internet service provider registry" to track whether broadband and wireless providers adhere to policies that keep the internet open and neutral.
Motherboard reports: In the wake of the FCC's repeal of net neutrality, more than half the states in the union are considering their own, state-level net neutrality rules. Some states are tackling the problem with legislation (California, Oregon, Washington), while others (like Montana) are signing executive orders banning state agencies from doing business with ISPs that behave anti-competitively... when the FCC repealed net neutrality, it included a provision attempting to "pre-empt" (read: ban) states from protecting consumers. As a result, large ISPs have threatened to sue any states that stand up for consumer welfare, and at least one ISP (Charter Spectrum) has tried to use the repeal to wiggle out of state lawsuits for terrible broadband. Charter's efforts on that front have failed, and the the FCC's authority to tell states what to do has been highly contested.
Still, Massachusetts thought it might be a better idea to try and publicly shame ISPs into behaving.
Motherboard reports: In the wake of the FCC's repeal of net neutrality, more than half the states in the union are considering their own, state-level net neutrality rules. Some states are tackling the problem with legislation (California, Oregon, Washington), while others (like Montana) are signing executive orders banning state agencies from doing business with ISPs that behave anti-competitively... when the FCC repealed net neutrality, it included a provision attempting to "pre-empt" (read: ban) states from protecting consumers. As a result, large ISPs have threatened to sue any states that stand up for consumer welfare, and at least one ISP (Charter Spectrum) has tried to use the repeal to wiggle out of state lawsuits for terrible broadband. Charter's efforts on that front have failed, and the the FCC's authority to tell states what to do has been highly contested.
Still, Massachusetts thought it might be a better idea to try and publicly shame ISPs into behaving.
Assuming isps are capable of shame. That's the best joke I've heard all week.
This seems kinda useless. So, the -only- provider in an area is SHAMED but still has all the customers. Great. Can't wait to see how MA proposes curing cancer. "We will SHAME the cells!"
Lawmakers in the state Senate have proposed a bill (S2160) that would create an "internet service provider registry" to track whether broadband and wireless providers adhere to policies that keep the internet open and neutral.
Why do they need a registry for a list you can count on one hand?
Require them to provide scarlet modems with the letter N painted on them. That would be very old-school Massachusetts.
The design of the Internet is such that if you simply deliver the "Internet" to an endpoint, the traffic is in accordance with the principles of Net Neutrality. So if an ISP comes along and delivers a filtered, manipulated and piecemeal subset of the Internet, then are they really delivering THE Internet?
Why not demand "truth in advertising"? If an ISP wants to abuse net neutrality, then they can't claim they are delivering the Internet: At best they can claim to be delivering "Part, but not all of the Internet, manipulated, blocked, and changed for our profit and your annoyance". Then consumers can decide what they really want to pay for.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
If you have public notifications, don't bother.
Now, if you have a traveling roadshow with board members and large stockholders in Pillories in public places, that's an idea I can get behind.
What? The state wants to define what ISPs should do, but rather than actually pass legislation to enforce their requirements they want to make a "rainman" list of companies that violate their legislated 'suggestions'?
They are acting like a bunch of powerless children - step up, pass a law and enforce it.
Ken
...simply send a stamped self-addressed envelope to:
Internet Bad Guys
PO Box 14153
Boston, MA
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I look forward to seeing what governments thing "Net Neutrality" is vs what the supporters thought it was.
Will be great to see actual codified definitions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
so long as the money's good they have no shame. Grow a pair and enforce Net Neutrality. This is an obvious attempt by a bunch of bought off politicians to avoid the repercussions of their policy decisions. If we had a functioning media & press they'd be called out on it. But the mega corps bought that too...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I agree. Trump is not the cause, he is a symptom.
He's like a big orange brain tumor that metastasized from rectal cancer.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
I am one of the few people here that actually advocates for REAL network neutrality. I am one of the few people not on a "side" other than the side of reason and fairness... I also appear to be one of the few people on the side of sanity.
I would LOVE to see a real Network Neutrality law. But I am also smart enough to realize politicians are not smart enough to produce something so simple and direct without goobering it up or using it to provide benefit to political allies at the expense of a truly open internet... until I see evidence of a real network neutrality law the free market (and the 1st amendment) has done more to provide us with an open internet than any regulation ever has.
Your problem is that anything that doesn't look like what you believe is labeled "partisan" automatically, like cave-men shrieking away from eclipses or anything else out of the ordinary.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
on Politicians, Lawyers, and Bankers...
Let's be honest here. How many people would willingly stay with Comcast if they had any (and I mean any, IP over carrier pigeon if necessary) choice? You can name and shame them as you want, as long as they have the monopoly you have no choice anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"The FCC doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality, so we will repeal our rules. Also the FCC DOES have the authority to interfere with states rights and preempt them from enforcing net neutrality on their own."
What a fucking joke. Pai is the transparent corporate stooge we all thought Wheeler would be.
As a Massachusetts resident I can assure you of three things: 1) There may be four people in the state who actually understand what Net Neutrality is 2) None of them are members of our legislature 3) We have far more problems - not the least of which is physical traffic in the state nevermind Internet - that our lawmakers should focus on. The Republican-Democrat animosity in this country is so bad that even in a rampantly Democrat state, we get ourselves distracted by what is happening in Washington.
I'm so old, I remember when "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" was a bumper sticker. Then Obama got elected and they mysteriously went away.
It's worse than that. It's gotten to the point where if someone gets called a nazi, it's because they've irritated some Red Guard who thinks they must be Silenced, and therefore probably has something interesting to listen to. It doesn't mean they're a nazi.
You don't remember 9/11 and how suddenly dissent meant that you were against the glorious USA and how we had to support the government no matter what?
Or perhaps the shit that was laid on anyone who dissented with the wonderful Ronny, such as mentioning the dealings with Iran or the government dealing illegal drugs.
It may have been after Nixon that dissent was really turned into a negative thing. Those awful dissenters brought down a President and even worse, were partially responsible for losing Vietnam. The government got very good at heading off dissent before it could formulate too much.
If I was older, I'd probably bring up the red hunts of the '50's or the 10's when simply handing out flyers disapproving of the draft was enough to get you thrown in prison with the agreement of the Supreme Court. You know, giving out flyers was like yelling fire in a theatre.
Going even further back, there was the way dissenters were treated in the early 1860's and even further back, how anyone dissenting with the revolution was treated.
I'll also note that all the dissent about Obama becomes cheering when the other team does similar stuff. I don't see the Tea party bitching about the current Trillion dollar deficit now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The right has an awfully selective memory of what liberals were saying during the Obama years. First few years of his presidency, in direct contradiction of campaign promises, not only did he not end federal raids of state-legal medical marijuana operations, under him the DOJ conducted even more of them than under Bush. Liberals were *furious* about this betrayal, and heaped on the criticism. There was plenty of liberal criticism of his drone strike programs. His failure to close Guantanamo. His failures to end Iraq/Afghanistan in a timely manner. We definitely weren't happy with him when he took the awful domestic warrantless surveillance programs of the Bush era and expanded them, even before Snowden blew the lid off, which resulted in even more liberal criticism of him and his natsec policies. He was notorious for cracking down on whistleblowers, and liberals were none too happy about it, nor about him targeting reporters phones and e-mails to go about his crackdown. The list goes on.
This ridiculous claim people on the right are making that liberals never criticised Obama's problems, much less told others it was racist and anti-American to criticize (except where complaints were legitimately based on race, which happened quite often) is yet another intellectually dishonest propaganda campaign from the right designed to delegitimize all the praise and fondness for those days he now receives, a direct response to how awful things are under Trump, in addition to delegitimizing complaints about Trump, by falsely painting a picture of hypocrisy.
When you have to engage in this kind of dishonesty to defend your position (or worse, you've bought into the campaign and actually thought it was honest), maybe reconsider if your position is the right place to be.
Who the hell modded this insightful? I'm against their thought policing but to think those two issues are even remotely related shows a profound misunderstanding of what net neutrality is and why it should be enforced. You're talking about website TOS versus near-monopoly wireline service to access websites. Conflating these is moronic.
And if you have a business, the Govt REQUIRES you to use the net to pay your monthly/quarterly taxes...yes, you HAVE to "visit us on the web". It's a utility now. If Uncle Sam won't take my money by check, or at my local Bank, only by web, it's friggin utility.
Run the risk of getting a good brands telco reputation caught up in the US party politics of "open internet principles"?
The more a state attempts to regulate and demand an ISP, telco has to do "open internet principles" the more such a state stands out from the rest of the USA.
Lawyers and experts needed to understand what complex compliance for political "open internet principles" is in that state.
To ensure full compliance in that state for their unique legal view of what "open internet principles" is in any year.
Say invested in that state with a new network.
Would "open internet principles" allow a limited for profit network to be created? Over a wealthy part of a city, gated communities?
Good parts of a state that could pay back such an investment in a fast new network?
Would state party politics demand that all the state then get the same new network for "free"?
Poor communities will never be able to pay back the use of a new network.
Would "open internet principles" demand a telco build new network in areas of a state that would never make a profit and require constant payments to keep working?
A telco would be forced in a state under ""open internet principles"" to build a network and support a new network that would never make a profit?
So everyone in that state got their full equal share of free telco "open internet principles"?
Who is going to pay for an "open internet principles" design?
The customers in more wealthy areas and who pay for plans? So consumer can then get "free" "open internet principles" in poor parts of the state?
To do that would need massive new state gov support payments to ensure the telco can make a profit and support all the poor people getting free telco networks.
A new "open internet principles" tax to do a state wide network? Internet to nowhere.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If this happens the violators will publicly moan and wail about their hardware or software and say they working on it but the internetworking tubes are complicated and infrastructure hasn't been updated because of repressive Obama policies. Of course they'll secretly explain to big mutual fund investors that they're now able to charge customers a premium for what they used to provide as a matter of course. Joe Plumber pays extra to get decent pornhub video speed and advertisers and content providers pay extra to get their competitor's packets moved to the back of the bus. That's what America wanted, what they voted for and what they got. See? The system works.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Although its night a black/white thing, i notice that all those on the Left are for Net Neutrality and the vast majority of those on the Right are against it. And the worst part is when i read comments from those on the Right i get a sense they are mostly against it because those on the Left are for it. And the remaining others are against it because some leader in their group (ie, talk show host, or someone in power) told them to be against it. smh
Remain calm, snowflake. The WAAAAmbulance is on it's way.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
And another false equivalency, two actually, thanks. First, users upvoting and downvoting content is an entirely different issue than the host hiding or removing content based on viewpoint. Second, suggesting that inaccurate posts should not be upmodded is not the same as saying they should be downmodded. The comment was fine at 0; -1 should be reserved for spam and trolls.
You tried to come up with a way to insult me for pointing out your stupid comment, then fell flat on your face again with an even more ridiculously false comparison.