Washington state has passed the country’s toughest net neutrality legislation

https://www.fastcompany.com/40537222/washington-just-passed-the-countrys-toughest-net-neutrality-legislation

by sethbannon • 8 years ago

186 52 8 years ago

I 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• 8 years ago

It really should be up to the states

Thrymr• 8 years ago

How 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.

antishatter3• 8 years ago

It 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.

mkempe2• 8 years ago

One 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• 8 years ago

I 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• 8 years ago

FCC != Federal government. The FCC chairman claims that the FCC is not the correct agency, but rather the FTC.

loeg2• 8 years ago

I 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• 8 years ago

We 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.

brightsize• 8 years ago

In 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• 8 years ago

That's pretty much like most of the US, minus the "fiber in recent years" part.

loeg2• 8 years ago

Yeah, 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.)

gramstrong• 8 years ago

Bellingham had a local provider (PogoZone) pop up and they seem to be becoming more and more competitive with Comcast around here. Unfortunately, they service from a cell tower from which my house is obscured by a large hill. I have heard great things about them, though.

Comcast recently upped my bill after 12 months (which they said they wouldn't do). I wanted to downgrade to just internet (currently internet/basic cable), and they allegedly can only offer me 1 package for $110/mo and 400Mbps. I don't need that. So of course I will probably get roped in to paying for another internet/cable package, or internet/cable/phone, just to save a bit of value.

sonaltr• 8 years ago

I've had similar issues in Ontario (packaged internet + tv being cheaper than just internet) - Is there a reason why this is so?

passivepinetree• 8 years ago

There's also Wave, but they're not available in all parts of the city, so certain people like myself are basically forced to give Comcast money. I'd be thrilled if we had more options.

kaiby• 8 years ago

The 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• 8 years ago

Don't worry. The Republicans are running everything right now and if there's anything they support, it's state's rights

specialist• 8 years ago

I'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.

antishatter3• 8 years ago

We have kings and they have tyrants.

joshuaheard3• 8 years ago

I 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• 8 years ago

No, 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• 8 years ago

I 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).

joshuaheard3• 8 years ago

The 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.

Mikhail_Edoshin• 8 years ago

That is not entirely correct. One can sort packets by their type and make sure those that require expedient delivery (VOIP calls, streamed video, gaming calls) get out first. Smart profiling at this level would certainly speed up the overall experience; some consumer-grade routers have settings exactly for this kind of thing. It's not much different that different kind of mail handled by postal services. And while postal services probably cannot easily speed up the average delivery time for all their mail, they can certainly deliver certain mail much faster than the rest of it. For a price.

amluto• 8 years ago

ISPs can certainly charge Netflix more for more bandwidth. If a video provider wants an Internet connection, it can get bids from companies like Cogent, HE, Sprint, and maybe even Comcast. NN says, among other things, that Comcast can't say "hey Netflix, if you don't pay up, we'll throttle that traffic that you try to send our customers from your lovely Cogent connection".

24gttghh• 8 years ago

10th Amendment:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Yes I know that is a supposed truism inherent in the Constitution itself.

My question:

The FCC explicitly decided that it didn't want to enforce NN provisions (it gave up that power), so why can't states regulate it themselves?

joshuaheard3• 8 years ago

Basically, if the federal government decides it is going to regulate an area, the states can't make contradictory regulations. So, if the federal government says, ISPs can charge what they want for internet access, the states can't make a rule that says they can't. By removing the NN provisions, they did not give up regulating ISPs, they just moved the regulation back to where it was before Obama made up the new rules right before he left office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause

InclinedPlane• 8 years ago

That's not how that works. Net Neutrality is about preventing ISPs from limiting or throttling access to different parts of the internet. Under Net Neutrality Netflix can buy faster access to the internet at a higher price all it wants, they just can't buy access to you at a higher price. Without Net Neutrality an ISP could simply block you from having access to Netflix, or youtube, or facebook, or twitter, or amazon. Or they could throttle that traffic so that the experience was much worse than it would be otherwise. They could then force you or those companies to pay extra to "unlock" access.

Because broadband internet access in the US is substantially provided by effectively local monopolies there is a huge potential for abuse here, specifically in the form of "rent seeking". Without Net Neutrality there is a huge potential for ISPs to monetize access to you, to carve up, control, and censor what they allow to run over their pipes. This isn't hypothetical, it's happened. ISPs have blocked access to VOIP and voice chat services (like skype) because it competed with their own offerings. They've blocked access to specific webpages because they disagreed with the content on those sites. They've blocked access to streaming video. They've intercepted and redirected search queries (to sites like google) to their own commercial content. They've blocked payment services that competed with their own services. And so on.

urda• 8 years ago

You had a decent comment if you had just stuck with your first line. It's a valid question.

You went completely off the rails with your second, and you should take a moment and review the Bill of Rights before you comment again because it's hilariously wrong.

akkat• 8 years ago

This is great news. Now we can compare what ISPs do in NN states verses non NN states.

mlazos• 8 years ago

Has 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• 8 years ago

It 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• 8 years ago

Ironic posturing from the state that Comcast paid to ban municipal ISPs.

xingped• 8 years ago

Here's a question though that maybe someone with a little more legal savvy may be able to answer - does this ban bandwidth caps?

Washington state has passed the country’s toughest net neutrality legislation

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