California Delays Net Neutrality Law's Enforcement Until After Court Case (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: California has agreed to delay enforcement of its net neutrality law until after litigation that will determine whether states can implement their own net neutrality rules. California's net neutrality law was slated to take effect on January 1, 2019. But the Trump administration's Department of Justice and broadband industry sued to block the law and were seeking a preliminary injunction that would halt enforcement until litigation is over.

The DOJ and broadband industry had a good chance of winning a preliminary injunction because the Federal Communications Commission had declared that all state net neutrality rules are preempted. As the DOJ argued, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California must presume that the FCC preemption of state laws is valid since that preemption has not been overturned by any court. In a U.S. District Court filing today, California agreed to take no action to enforce the state net neutrality law until after the U.S. Court of Appeals case is decided and all appeals have been exhausted.

Comments

Re:No net neutrality = Internet 2014

[Pfhorrest]

You're missing out on almost all of the history. Net neutrality was not first introduced in 2014; that wasn't even the start of legal battle over sustaining it.

We had net neutrality by default since the start of the internet, because the early internet was a highly competitive market, piggybacking on top of the phone network that was regulated as a common carrier under Title II, between the two of which no ISP could get away shit like breaking net neutrality.

When broadband happened, the last-mile providers (the phone and cable companies) BECAME the internet service providers, and thus internet service was no longer a competitive market, and internet service per se was not explicitly regulated as a Title II common carrier service, so they could start pulling shady shit like breaking net neutrality.

Then a law was passed saying no, in fact, they cannot pull that shit, and have to keep doing things like they always have been.

That law was later overturned because, as internet service was not classified under Title II, it was deemed to be beyond the jurisdiction of the FCC to regulate that way.

Later, in 2014, the FCC reclassified internet service under Title II after all -- as it should have been from the beginning -- and thus the law requiring ISPs to keep behaving as they always had, neutrally, was applicable again.

Now Pai's FCC has reversed that classification, invalidating that law, and once again clearing the way for the ISPs to start doing things differently than they always have been.

There has been a long war to keep ISPs from breaking the internet. 2014 saw one battle in that war won on the side of consumers. But the war is still going on, and now we, the consumers, are losing out.

Re:So in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, grasshopper, no knowledge of history or the Internet!

There is a difference between ICANN's policy of assigning domain names, DNS, and net neutrality. Perhaps some time spent learning (not skimming one Wikipedia article) would make you come across as more informed and therefore deserving of intellectual respect.

But hey, keep trolling by repeating propaganda tweets if it makes you feel good!