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Washington state has passed the country’s toughest net neutrality legislation
- jonwachob91 9y agoI always found it amusing that the FCC claimed they didn’t have a right to regulate Net Neutrality, but they do have the right to prevent individual states from regulating Net Neutrality.
- wtfrmyinitials 9y agoIt really should be up to the states
- Thrymr 9y agoHow so? Because the federal government has abrogated its responsibility? Surely compliance with 50 different sets of regulations would be much more burdensome than a single national regulation.
- splintercell 9y agoIt's a feature not a bug. If you believe that nobody should do X, where X could be any public policy on a gradient (whether it's sales tax, income tax, etc), then sure you'd consider this as a bug, but it helps in figuring out the good solutions much faster.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y agoAs far as I can tell as a non-american: people support states rights when the federal government does something they dislike, and they support federalisation when it does something they do like. Most people aren't very principled about it.
- dsr_ 9y agoMostly that's true. More specifically, the Republican Party is a champion of states' rights when it comes to regulating civil liberties or implementing health care, education and anti-poverty measures. They are quiet about states' rights when it comes to control of corporations, where they prefer to have the power centralized but unused. The Democratic Party, by way of contrast, never talks about states' rights, but supports various individual initiatives that align with their federal policy. There are very few people who care about states' rights as a concept divorced from particular policies.
- kevin_b_er 9y agoThey are a champion of states' rights where it affects their sponsors' bottom lines and fiercely opposed where it affects their sponsors' bottom lines. Always follow the money.
- aerotwelve 9y agoThe right-wing contempt for local control is going even further nowadays. After the 2016 elections, counties in my home state of Iowa are no longer allowed to set a minimum wage that is higher than the state's level (which is, of course, $7.25)[1]. By traditional conservative thought, a county would only be hurting themselves by setting a minimum wage that's too high; companies and their jobs would leave if it wasn't competitive. Of course, if raising the minimum wage didn't kill jobs, others could point to it as evidence that it may be feasible to increase it statewide. So it's gotta go. [commentary: I grew up in a conservative family, but I don't recognize the modern Republican Party.] [1] http://www.thegazette.com/gov-branstad-signs-bill-to-roll-back-minimum-wage-20170330 http://www.thegazette.com/gov-branstad-signs-bill-to-roll-ba...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- craftyguy 9y ago> [commentary: I grew up in a conservative family, but I don't recognize the modern Republican Party.] I don't think even Ronald Reagan would recognize the modern republican party.
- smileysteve 9y agoThe difficulty in compliance to 50 different regulations is exactly what's going to drive Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to re-lobby for a legislative (permanent) position of the FCC on NN.
- hedora 9y agoIf we can make it burdensome enough to comply with multiple state’s laws, then there will be no inter-state ISP’s. That’d be great for competition in the residential broadband market (at least compared to the status quo). A better approach would be to simply break up all the big ISPs and telcos, of course.
- SllX 9y agoDirect-to-consumer/business ISPs only have to comply with the State regulations that they choose to operate in. Sonic.net doesn't have to worry about Floridian regulations, but Comcast has to worry about Californian and Floridian regulations because they have operations in both States. That said, they are also large enough to take on that extra burden and still profit, with no loss of competitive advantage. I'm not worried about making it easier for ISPs to expand across State lines because I don't live in 50 different States. I live in one, and I want the right package of regulations for the place that I live, not the millions of places I don't, for every ISP in my area, not the hundreds to thousands that aren't.
- antishatter 9y agoIt seems a somewhat complex issue. One the one hand companies that control the internet and the infrastructure in use often spreads across state lines and regions. The other hand is that it is very difficult to claim the internet infrastructure and needs of a place like Washington or California are analogous to the needs of much more rural parts of the country. I generally find myself against states rights in terms of civil liberties or personal rights and in favor of them with regards to business in their de facto economic region except in the case previously mentioned such as the violation of rights. It seems plausible that the FCC shouldn't be able to regulate or control policy on net neutrality and that their control of the internet is basically because at the time questions of regulation came up there was not better place to stick the internet. However, now that the internet has become an effective necessity I'd imagine placing it's control under something more akin to the Public utilities commission may make the most sense. edit: Maybe the real solution is public internet projects, I have heard of several that seemed to go quite well.
- mkempe 9y agoOne can hold that under a limited, federal government structure there are things the Federal government must not do (because it is either explicitly barred from it or it is not one of its explicitly enumerated powers), and that the same constraint applies to the States. For instance, under the US constitution, freedom of expression limits all levels of government.
- eksu 9y agoI liked the above comment and wanted to tack on my reply to jonwachob91 here. There are some cases where affirmative rights granted to the federal government also limits the power of the states. For example, the Supreme Court found in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) that not only does Congress have the right to regulate interstate commerce, but only Congress does, and that States can't create their own rules for commerce between each other. (The FCC can claim they don't have the right to enforce Title 2, but that's really for the Supreme Court to decide.) I think it's worth noting that Title 2 classification is not Net Neutrality, and that the Title 2 classification was based off of an idea of 'forbearance', that the government has granted itself broad sweeping regulatory powers over telecoms but promises not to use a lot of them (rate setting, etc). Title 2 classification had a lot of problems, and real Net Neutrality legislation is preferable.
- Paul-ish 9y agoFCC != Federal government. The FCC chairman claims that the FCC is not the correct agency, but rather the FTC.
- mkempe 9y agoThis seems so concrete-bound... Moving to the conceptual level, since the initial F in each agency name stands for "Federal" -- in what sense are they not part of the Federal government? are they somehow not subject to the limits imposed by the Constitution?
- loeg 9y agoI live in WA and am amused. I didn't hear anything about this until now. This isn't quite the same issue as NN, but in Seattle we had a single ISP monopoly (Comcast) until quite recently. Centurylink has started offering fiber in the last few years, but before that there was an uninterrupted decade where Comcast was the only viable broadband option for most homes. (A number of vendors offered DSL, but it was extremely slow and typically not price-competitive; a small number of vendors offered very fast internet, but only in condos / apartment buildings in or near the downtown core.)
- rbritton 9y agoWe have the same issue on the other side of the state in Spokane. In the majority of the metropolitan area, Comcast is your only viable option. Where I live, I can get up to around 250 Mbit Comcast or 1-5 Mbit CenturyLink.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- brightsize 9y agoIn the north-central part of town (Garland 'hood) I'm getting 40Mb service from CenturyLink and it's generally pretty reliable though throughput really drops during the mid- and late afternoon. I didn't know that Comcast offered such high data rates here though so thanks for the tip.
- rconti 9y agoThat's pretty much like most of the US, minus the "fiber in recent years" part.
- loeg 9y agoYeah, and the caveat is still "fiber in certain areas," although that area is expanding and much larger than the previous near-downtown services. For example, I live about 7 miles from the downtown core and have "gigabit" service available over fiber. (Centurylink uses a bunch of splitters for downstream traffic, which is multiplexed, so you're effectively limited to about 600 mbps down.)
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoThe recurring problem is that there are only 2 players in this game, Comcast and Verizon and they pay lobbyists, and get their way. There needs to be duopoly/monopoly busting, because here we are in 2018 and we can tell that Americas High speed internet offerings are expensive and choice limited And worse any competition has to deal with Verizon or comcast on the backend making competition frustrating or impossible. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work.
- kaiby 9y agoThe best line for me was: “Just because the FCC claims it has the power to preempt state laws doesn’t mean that it actually does,” says Hansen. “I can claim that I have the power to manifest unicorns on the Washington State Capitol lawn. But if you look outside right now, there are no unicorns.” I hope it succeeds.
- criddell 9y agoDon't worry. The Republicans are running everything right now and if there's anything they support, it's state's rights /s
- specialist 9y agoI'm as partisan as they come. And am only too happy to pile on. But I also remember the Clipper chip, SOPA, PIPA... My own state representative voted for internet voting along with the herd after promising me he wouldn't without checking with me first. Fair play, rule of law, fare and impartial courts, etc. are not partisan issues. If we bring the heat, they'll see they light.
- justin66 9y ago> Fair play, rule of law, fare and impartial courts, etc. are not partisan issues. "State's rights" of the kind the person you're responding is joking about are a partisan issue in the United States.
- antishatter 9y agoWe have kings and they have tyrants.
- jonny_eh 9y agoIt never hurts to point out the hypocrisy of those actually in charge.
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- joshuaheard 9y agoI really don't understand this law. ISPs offer me faster internet for a higher price. But is illegal for ISPs to offer Netflix faster internet for a higher price. What is the distinction? In any event, this is pure virtue signalling, since the federal government clearly has supremacy over state laws for national telecommunication networks, and this will be overturned by the courts.
- jetpacktuxedo 9y agoNo, you can't pay your ISP to get "faster internet", only to get more bandwidth between your wall and whatever backhaul provider owns the physical fiber lines. There is no way to make the internet "faster" other than reducing the number of hops you have to make to get to the destination, or by increasing the speed of packets on the networks, which should already be roughly speed of light. Therefore if they are proposing "fast lanes" it isn't about speeding you up, but rather about slowing everyone else down. Net Neutrality doesn't prevent ISPs from selling more bandwidth to netflix, it only prevents ISPs from treating the traffic differently due to the identity of either the sender or the receiver. This means that Comcast can't slow your traffic down just because you are sending data to and receiving data from netflix instead of using Hulu (which they partially own).
- p1necone 9y agoI agree with you for the most part, but it's a bit disingenuous to interpret "Faster Internet" as just referring to latency, people are almost always talking about bandwidth + latency when using that term (really just how long files/webpages take to download on average - which equates to that).
- joshuaheard 9y agoThe article states, "All internet service offered in Washington would have to be free from blocking or throttling of legal online content. Nor could it be subject to a system of premium-priced “fast lanes” that offer better bandwidth to content providers that pay extra for the privilege." So, the law does prevent ISPs from offering "faster" internet, however you define it. I still don't see the distinction between allowing consumers to pay for faster internet, but prohibiting content providers from doing the same thing. I pay more for 250 mbps. Why can't Comcast offer Netflix additional speed for more money, which would be illegal under this law? As I understand it, slowing down your competitors is already illegal under the FTC rules.
- akkat 9y agoThis is great news. Now we can compare what ISPs do in NN states verses non NN states.
- mlazos 9y agoHas there been a resolution as to who was generating the fraudulent comments on the FCC proposal? I believe they’re real I’ve just been wondering why someone/some organization would do that, unless it was some conspiracy by the ISPs, but they don’t need fake comments when they have lobbyists.
- drawnwren 9y agoIt would be interesting for someone to identify regions in states that have similar internet conditions before NN. We might have some interesting data to peruse if the curr situation holds for a few years.
- stonogo 9y agoIronic posturing from the state that Comcast paid to ban municipal ISPs.
- xingped 9y agoHere's a question though that maybe someone with a little more legal savvy may be able to answer - does this ban bandwidth caps?
- puppetmaster400 9y agoPerfect. At state level. AND: legislation. Unlike what prior administration did, at federal level, without legislation - congress was NOT involved. (never mind if it was good or not http://easydns.com/blog/2017/11/27/net-neutrality-wasnt-all-it-was-cracked-up-to-be http://easydns.com/blog/2017/11/27/net-neutrality-wasnt-all-... )
- puppetmaster400 9y agoDownvoted.
- sctb 9y agoYou've been using Hacker News primarily to do ideological battle and using multiple accounts to do so. That clearly violates the guidelines, so we've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html