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Colorado's 'Open Internet' Bill Would Punish Internet-Providing Violators By Taking Their Grant Money Away (coloradosun.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Colorado Sun: Now that Democrats are in charge, Colorado's second attempt at its own version of a net neutrality law passed the General Assembly and now heads to Gov. Jared Polis for his certain signature. Keeping internet speeds consistent regardless of whether a customer is streaming video from Comcast or Netflix wasn't the only intent of the Senate Bill 78. The bill also makes internet service providers pay back state grants to build broadband infrastructure if those companies use paid prioritization to favor some internet traffic over others, or slow down speeds for some users.
The Colorado law is similar to the former federal one in that it would prohibit ISPs from prioritizing certain content. It would also force violating ISPs that benefited from state broadband grants to refund all money received in the previous 24 months. After the governor signs the bill into law, Colorado's attorney general would by Oct. 1 create guidelines on how consumers can file complaints about net neutrality violations. "What I was really looking for in this year's bill was the appropriate nexus of action. A lot of the bills we saw getting in trouble in other states, or bills that were facing a lot of opposition, were more about sending a message of net neutrality instead of looking for a fulcrum point for state action," said Sen. Kerry Donovan, a Democrat from Vail who sponsored last year's bill and wrote this year's bill. "This bill says that if you're going to ask to be funded by the people in Colorado directly out of their paycheck then you need to adhere to these principles."
The Colorado law is similar to the former federal one in that it would prohibit ISPs from prioritizing certain content. It would also force violating ISPs that benefited from state broadband grants to refund all money received in the previous 24 months. After the governor signs the bill into law, Colorado's attorney general would by Oct. 1 create guidelines on how consumers can file complaints about net neutrality violations. "What I was really looking for in this year's bill was the appropriate nexus of action. A lot of the bills we saw getting in trouble in other states, or bills that were facing a lot of opposition, were more about sending a message of net neutrality instead of looking for a fulcrum point for state action," said Sen. Kerry Donovan, a Democrat from Vail who sponsored last year's bill and wrote this year's bill. "This bill says that if you're going to ask to be funded by the people in Colorado directly out of their paycheck then you need to adhere to these principles."
Yes and you shouldn’t get skull-smashing drunk either. But if you already have, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a cab home because it’s too late to make any good choices.
Companies that receive subsidies or grants from tax payers should lose some of their freedoms they would otherwise enjoy. Don’t like the rules, don’t take the money.
Government money to corporations must be free and easy so they can use it best, unlike welfare to the poor which must be heavily restricted!
Could be using a phone and cellular data. The mobile carriers typically aren’t regarded as ISPs.
Because people expect to be paid when the government wants something done.
The problem isn't traffic management..it's that just about every ISP in America operates on a very huge conflict of interest: We have very few stand-alone ISP's anymore; they're all rolled in to some kind of cable/television provider. The problem is things like Netflix and Hulu hurt your video business...and the high-speed internet connection you sell is allowing people to view your competitors. In captialistic America...this is bad. It's a conflict of interest for them to sell you a service that will let you access a competitor. The companies want all your money, they won't get all your money that way. So there's a LOT of interest on them to block, throttle, or degrade competition. It's not an issue of "different lanes"; it's the fact the ISP's don't want you to use all those lanes. They absolutely want to deny you the video-streaming lane. And hey..while we're at it. WalShart paid us a whole bunch of money to direct customers over there...so we're going to give 100% priority to WalShart's website and we're going to restrict access to Amazon as per our agreement. Hey...Faux News is offering us even more money to make sure all our customers can only consume their news online...so we'll make sure Faux's website loads in two seconds but everyone else will time out. This is not playing favorites against YouTube and Netflix...this is saying "We don't want you using either so you'll have to pay for our services." 5G is apparently going to focus on home internet as well. Just about every wireless provider owns a TV service in some way or another. You think a customer on TMobile will be able to subscribe to Sling? Hell no! They're going to block every other streaming video service so you will take their Level3 or nothing. Verizon will do it with their TV...hell...AT&T is already walking down the path of making DirecTV an exclusive product that will require their network. Sure, that's a few years down the road...but they've effectively launched the very last satellite. Once the current fleet is dead...they'll be streaming only. None of this will really be competition. The providers will collude to keep prices high. The consumers will once again be getting fucked by big corporate thanks to the backing of a government that feels consumer rights don't exist.
Only existing networks can keep internet speeds consistent?
What would big gov see as slowing down speeds for some users?
Is that an old network with way, way too many users always slow? An active new attempt to slow down speeds for "some" users?
Your ISP is now going to have to make you pay for their negotiations with big gov over day to day network conditions.
Who is going to invest if big gov wants to see how "some" users are doing?
Can an ISP prove "some" users are getting the same speeds as all users but their wireline is really, really old?
Will the ISP have to send it reports as to why "some" users are getting not the same speeds?
How many people will an ISP have to pay to report network conditions to big gov?
Thats a new service so your ISP can report on the existing network conditions to big gov.
Gov approved ISP teasing big gov just how slow your service is year after year. But the network is always NN in its slowness for all users.
No gated community is sneaking in network speed by paying more. No gentrification and getting in a great new ISP.
No community broadband as only a few selected and regulated ISP can prove to big gov they are full NN ready.
No innovation. No new competition. Welcome back to gov regulated NN ready wireline.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
When the goddam federal government is a fucking loony bin, the states step up and say, "Hold my beer."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You think a customer on TMobile will be able to subscribe to Sling? Hell no! They're going to block every other streaming video service so you will take their Level3 or nothing.
That's not what T-Mobile has in place. The "Binge On" feature of T-Mobile plans doesn't count video against subscribers' cap so long as it's 1.5 Mbps or lower. (The vast majority of 480p video using AVC or VP8 is lower than that.) Binge On is open to any video provider that's willing to join. And I see no reason for this to end any time soon, even with the Sprint merger, as it'd break the "we're not AT&T" draw of the T-Mobile brand.
hell...AT&T is already walking down the path of making DirecTV an exclusive product that will require their network. Sure, that's a few years down the road...but they've effectively launched the very last satellite. Once the current fleet is dead...they'll be streaming only.
Some rural customers have satellite television from DirecTV because they live outside the service footprint of AT&T's high-volume Internet and IPTV service. Should DirecTV stop offering satellite television, that'll just leave Dish with a bunch of new customers.
"Blocking *lawful* internet content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices unless such blocking is conducted in a manner consistent with reasonable network management practices"
"Regulating network traffic by throttling bandwidth or otherwise impairing or degrading *lawful* internet traffic on the basis of internet content"
Emphasis mine. How are they going to tell what constitutes lawful or unlawful content? I guess they'll just have to snoop on everything you do, log it and report back to the authorities. It gives ISPs implicit authority to track, literally, everything you do. It may be interpreted as a requirement.
How about this: No payment for preferential treatment of bandwidth. Period.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Don't be silly. Then who would pay their bribes?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That's because phones and cellular data don't support streaming.
I have a teenage daughter, and she streams over cellular all the time ... in her room ... 10 feet from the router ... with WiFi disabled because she forgot to turn it on ... blowing through the family-plan data cap in the first week of the month.
Progress!
Firmware updates should not change settings.
Or better still, enforce antitrust laws and force the ISPs to learn how to behave.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Laws aren't worth the paper they're written on unless they are enforced in a method that actually has a punishing effect on the violator.
Too many corporate regulations have fines so low the companies will happily ignore them and then write off the fines as a "cost of doing business".
That all sounds fine..... But what if you have 4 choices...just four. All four do the same activity. There is no other alternative than to go with an ISP that blocks the content you want. Your solution is a fantasy. I have exactly one choice for internet at my house. One. The other provider will not run infrastructure to me because "it's not cost effective"; and there's no way in hell a wireless service works. Hell...without wifi calling on my phone; you'd never be able to get in touch with me.
We're about at the point now that the ISP's are forbidding you from using your own equipment. They maintain it's "their network" and will only allow "their equipment".
We are literally going back to pre-Carterphone Ma Bell.
I fail to see how a company that gets blocked out from customers can make a higher margin. If no one will serve your traffic to your customers...you won't have customers. No customers. No Money.
Nothing in the article prevents ISPs, who typically use throttling as a means of cost control, from having to charge the consumer MORE for their service. If the average colorado resident is paying $65/mo for 100mbps service; my prediction is that within two years of this legislation passing, they will be paying at least $120/mo for the same service and you will have fewer options. The same shit happened when they started forcing insurances to cover stuff. First rates went up, and then companies started pulling out. I predict both will happen. You’ll get exactly what you regulated, a wide open faucet. The ones that stick around will charge the shit out of you and it will probably get maintained poorly and suffer packet loss. This is what happens when people think they can force a company to pay for shit. Remember the TRS fund? The Universal Services fund? Subscriber line charges? We sure made the telcos pay for all that shit disnt we? We sure showed them. Seen your bill lately? The taxes, fees, and regulatory costs exceed the service portion.
You don't need QoS, you just need fair queuing, which is protocol agnostic. My ISP has zero QoS for any non-management traffic. They have a fully guaranteed bandwidth through the entire network from customer to the trunk. Even on my connection, they have some fair queuing AQM that allows me to saturate my connection both up and down at the same time with P2P traffic, and still get zero loss, zero jitter, and idle level latency.
It does not matter what traffic I use, fairness is effectively maintained per flow. A greedy stream can only affect its own latency, loss, and jitter. Not only does this statistically isolate streams from each other statelessly, important for scaling to many streams. But it also helps stabilize greedy flows. Loss is minimized, jitter is minimized, latency is minimized, utilization can remain at a steady 99.9%, no TCP saw-tooth action. This almost completely eliminates bursted loss caused by dumb fixed FIFO queues. With my current AQM, TCP almost never enters exponential backoff.
This also has a positive effect on DOS attacks. A simulated DDOS attack still negatively affects packetloss and bandwidth because the too many source IPs overwhelm the statistical flow isolation, but a relatively few source IPs attempted to do a volumetric DOS has little affect on anything but bandwidth. Because the flows are isolated for latency and loss, the only thing affected is bandwidth, and even that is fairly distributed across flows.
These modern AQMs make the internet feel much faster by minimizing buffer bloat and keeping the TCP window near optimal to keep latency nearly unaffected while allowing bandwidth to be maximized and stabilizes the bandwidth. It also keeps TCP global synchronization from occurring.
This same kind of feature seems to be applied at all levels. The ISP's trunk seems to have this. During a DDOS against the entire ISP, latency was about 20ms higher than normal and bandwidth was about 30% of my provisioned, but virtually zero loss or jitter. I could still play games just fine. Another time the transit provider was under attack. Similar characteristics but 2 hops further upstream. A few 10s of ms increased base latency, still almost no loss or jitter, but reduced bandwidth.
There is no reason for congestion to affect loss, jitter, or latency by any detrimental amount. Look into Codel, PIE, and their fair queuing versions, like fq_codel. Freaking magic.