SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:16AM (1 child)
Montana is already full of mom-and-pop ISPs selling fixed wireless, at very high prices, in the 80% or so of the state where CenturyLink DSL and your cellphone's access don't exist.
I think it's more likely that CenturyLink is trying to regain their former monopoly, especially since the real goal of the average mom-and-pop ISP is to get bought out by whoever is the nearest 800 pound gorilla.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darnkitten on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:01PM
Our not-so-local co-op, while expensive, seems to do a reasonable job (for a fair-to-middling definition of "reasonable"), and has so far resisted selling out--with the exception of ridding itself of its cell division about a decade ago, when it turned out that in getting into the cell game early, it had adopted the wrong standards.
Anyway, it provides faster and more reliable internet access than the competing satellite and wireless internet companies, which started off competitive, but oversold their capacities and failed to upgrade to keep up with the co-op's advances.