Washington state has passed the country’s toughest net neutrality legislation
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
“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.
/s
Fair play, rule of law, fare and impartial courts, etc. are not partisan issues.
If we bring the heat, they'll see they light.
"State's rights" of the kind the person you're responding is joking about are a partisan issue in the United States.
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.
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.
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-ba...
I don't think even Ronald Reagan would recognize the modern republican party.
Some pedantry on word choice: federalism is more like equal state/central gov power; confederalism is pro-states rights.
1- https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and-katie...
A better approach would be to simply break up all the big ISPs and telcos, of course.
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.
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.
For instance, under the US constitution, freedom of expression limits all levels of government.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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?
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.
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.