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Comment by mgiampapa | Hacker News Reader

Because California saved it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_P...

If any of the companies that wanted to exploit the lack of FCC enforced net neutrality did business with California they would have had a big problem.

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This can't be stated enough.

They could not get away with it. Otherwise, they would. There is little to no competition in the segment. And that must change.

This, and that it is far more profitable for ISPs to aggregate our traffic patterns and sell them to ad companies and governments than to drive people to VPNs by raising awareness of the reasons we can't trust them.

the neutrality rule would be applying to ISPs. Those would be local to California. Outside of California, we would see the effects of no net neutrality

Yes, but the big ISPs would have a much harder time explaining the difference. Imagine them going into court or Congress having to explain why they needed to shakedown Netflix in NYC but not LA or explain why it suddenly became cost-prohibitive to run a network when you cross the border into Oregon or Arizona.

Without NN, under what charge would they be going to court?

Challenges to a state or local law, any kind of unfair competition or price gouging suit brought by consumers, any sort of anti-competitive behavior suit brought by one of the companies they try to double-charge or compete with?

I believe a side effect of the way the legislation was written included that if they weren't neutral, then they couldn't do business with the State of California either or anything the state runs, like pension plans.

How much can you make doing business with or in CA vs. grifting the rest of the nation and bad press? It's very risky move. CA won and Verizon et all blinked.

There were lawsuits over the repeal under Trump raising uncertainty. That lawsuit wasn't resolved until 2019.

California adopted it's net neutrality law in 2018. 12 other states adopted net neutrality laws or executive actions, and over 100 local governments also did so, some before and some after the lawsuit over the federal repeal was resolved. Democrats in Congress in 2019 moved to legislatively reverse the repeal, and that passed through one house. Biden was elected in 2020, and either a legislative or executive reinstatement of net neutrality was expected.

All of this made meant that big ISPs would have to have patchwork rules in different jurisdictions if they wanted to skirt net neutrality and face a significant risk of having to unwind them. So, generally, no one did much that would go against net neutrality.

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