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from the waiting-for-48-more-states-to-follow-suit dept.
The Montana governor's office has a message for the Federal Communications Commission and Internet service providers: the state can't be stopped from protecting net neutrality, and ISPs that don't like it don't have to do business with state agencies.
Governor Steve Bullock signed an executive order to protect net neutrality on Monday, as we reported at the time. But with questions raised about whether Bullock is exceeding his authority, the governor's legal office prepared a fact sheet that it's distributing to anyone curious about potential legal challenges to the executive order.
ISPs are free to violate net neutrality if they only serve non-government customers—they just can't do so and expect to receive state contracts. "Companies that don't like it don't have to do business with the State—nothing stops ISPs from selling dumpy Internet plans in Montana if they insist," the fact sheet says.
The FCC's repeal of net neutrality rules attempts to preempt states and localities from issuing their own similar rules. But Bullock's executive order doesn't directly require ISPs to follow net neutrality rules. Instead, ISPs that accept contracts to provide Internet service to any state agency must agree to abide by net neutrality principles throughout the state.
Source: Ars Technica
(Score: 3, Interesting) by melikamp on Monday January 29 2018, @11:21PM (2 children)
Spyphone companies are indeed very nasty and very entrenched, but they too will buckle once there's a political will to create a network accountable to the public. Imagine a municipality just starting to unroll its own towers in an urban setting, with free anonymous access to the Internet over 5G. If the sphyphone mafia can't sue them, they will be crawling to the negotiating table the very next day, on their knees, begging to go easy on them.
Imagine covering something like San Francisco or Manhattan. Even though residents may be keeping their old predatory spy-phones for a while, they can now take 95% of the bandwidth for free from the city. They can't make free legacy phone calls, but they get free videophone app connectivity to everyone in the same city and other places with a similar situation.
All of this is well-known to the monopolists, which is why the current push to legislate the consumer into servile obedience through stronger user-hostile copyrights, stronger user-hostile patents, criminal liabilities for reverse-engineering, weakening the net neutrality, and making the municipal networks illegal.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Spamalope on Tuesday January 30 2018, @12:22AM (1 child)
It's much cheaper to pay to elect someone friendly to the telcos. Just like they've been doing. You know, get all those billions for broadband then pocket most and spend a few tens of millions to insure there are no repercussions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @12:11PM