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California's Net Neutrality bill just passed out of committee and is on its way to be voted on by the Assembly. If you are a California voter, please take a moment now to call your assemblymember and tell them to vote "yes" on SB 822.
Senate Bill 822 was originally introduced earlier this summer and would introduce some of the most robust net neutrality protections in the country, including prohibiting blocking and throttling of data, as well as limits on zero rating—a practice where companies provide access to certain parts of the internet for “free” and charge for others. But on the first go around, when being considered by the state senate Communications and Conveyance Committee, the bill was dramatically gutted, thanks to heavy lobbying from major telecom companies like AT&T. In response, the bill’s supporters scrapped it.
The bill’s author, democratic state senator Scott Wiener, went back to the drawing board and, with the help of the bill’s proponents, managed to get more committee members to back it, including state assemblyperson Miguel Santiago, who led the original effort to dismantle the bill. He then brought the bill back from the dead.
On Wednesday, the committee held a second hearing on the bill, which drew dozens of members of the public in support. After a mild debate, which included telecom lobbyists claiming the bill was anti-competitive and would have devastating impacts on consumers (while also misrepresenting the bill’s language and taking weird digs at the Netherlands), the committee voted 8-2 to adopt the bill. It will now go to the state assembly for a vote.
And California's other #NetNeutrality bill, SB 460, has also passed a vote and is on its way to another committee hearing. Californians, keep telling your assemblymembers to stand up for a free and open Internet. [Help California Secure Net Neutrality Protections: Support S.B. 822 and S.B. 460] — EFF (@EFF)
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:09PM (9 children)
>If you are a California voter, please take a moment now to call your assemblymen and tell them to vote "yes" on SB 822.
How about I weight the pro's and con's myself and vote in my own best interests instead of for your agenda.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:21PM
Presumptuous to ask will you please do something?
Hey Rtard, presumptuous would be if they said "Every California voter should vote for this" or something with a little more bite than a question using "please".
And unless you're a giant ISP then this would be in your own best interest. "R" stands for "reeeee" and "tard" stands for "stuuuupid", I feel like in your case I need to make that clear.
I must say I'm surprised you didn't mention Marx, Venezuela, socialism or communism. You know the magic market fairy won't come tonight and give you dreams of being a billionaire right?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:25PM (4 children)
There's probably a catch, or a rider, on the bill. It has to be weighed against the overall gain of CA taking a stand on NN (which is in the Bay's startups interests).
Feel free to tell your elected official to vote for Net Neutrality, and to try to remove any questionable Appendix.
I think we can agree that it is your "own best interest", unless you loaded up on Verizon/AT&T stock.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:06PM (3 children)
The catch is no one who's writing these bills has the slightest idea of what net neutrality even is or how the internet actually works at the machine level.
Take the Verizon / Fire Dept debacle out there in CA. Everyone is running around screaming how this is what happens when you repeal net neutrality when in fact it has absolutely nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with some moron dept head in the Fire Dept who negotiated a really crap contract for mobile services without doing a proper needs assessment or even making emergency plans for what to do if cell services were down, like they very well could be after a major earthquake. Either that or they just assumed they could strongarm a private company into giving them services they never paid for.
If you make a deal with me for 5 apples every day until you hit 100 apples and agree to only one apple a day after that, then you can't get pissed off when you eat your 100 apples and then wonder why you are only getting one now. If you wanted 5 apples every day no matter what, then that's the deal you should have made in the first place. I don't owe you four apples just because you're hungry.
Further, net neutrality means I don't care what kind of traffic you're flinging across the line, I'll still give you the bandwidth you paid for. Doesnt matter if it's netflix or amazon prime or some illegal torrent. Thats clearly not what was going on with the Fire Dept. They exceeded their business contract. Verizon isn't obligated to give them more services than they paid for. If they needed more, they should have negotiated for more and paid for it. And in point of fact, Verizon told them flat out they could immediately increase their bandwidth if they paid for the other plan.
This is just more people feeling their entitled to services they didn't pay for. Free college, free medical care, free housing... that's not how the world works. They need to grow the hell up and take responsibility for their actions and their own failures.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:22PM (1 child)
You must be posting in the wrong article. You just advocated FOR net neutrality which is what this article is about. You are right, ISPs should sell bandwidth and not give a damn what is going through the pipes, and shouldn't be invading the privacy of users by long term logging without a court order.
The other article about firemen and verizon is a different topic, but on that note verizon shouldn't be selling a plan as unlimited if they can't support it. Fine print should be illegal. However you are correct, it seems the firemen exceeded the bandwidth that falls under "unlimited with fine print attached"
I don't think you understand how the world works beyond a very basic level. Let me guess, you don't even need to pause to know what TANSTAAFL means? Universal healthcare and education aren't free, you use them and then you work and pay taxes for them. Pretty much all the countries with universal healthcare and education have better outcomes than the US, and please don't bring out the tired meme of "but homogenous societies!"
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Friday August 24 2018, @12:30PM
That's not what I said at all. I said the ISP doesn't care what YOU are running through their pipes. However all ISP's have to manage their resources and prioritize their traffic. If I'm serving a residential area with a 10GbE link and 2% of the users there are gorging themselves on 80% of that pipe then I would be inclined to throttle those 2% so I can better serve the other 98%. Traffic shapping is a necessary thing in order to provide proper services to everyone.
What people are missing here isn't about net neutrality or common carrier status. It has everything to do with requiring ISP's to be ONLY ISP's. When the ISP is also a media giant, THAT is where the conflict crops up. If we break up Comcrap into two seperate companies - the internet carrier and the media company, then this whole issue goes away. Comcast Internet and Comcast Media should be two seperate entities with Comcast Media competing with all the other cable tv providers for equal access to the Comcast Internet infrastructure. Then you have competition and competition is what works best for the consumer.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:49PM
I'll second the AC in pointing out that your responded mostly out of topic.
To address the offtopic fire department problem, the problem stems from the Federal government allowing wireless spectrum auctions without mandating that the bid winners have to provide true unlimited data to emergency services (with a clause to review potential abusive conduct). The state of CA has the same duty: "Oh, you want towers? I've got firemen and cops here, and they need to communicate reliably during emergencies".
Verizon's leased public asset (frequencies) should come with the proper constraints, to avoid millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted having each department negotiate individual terms.
To the point of unlimited apples, if you tell someone : "you can get X gigs of data, followed by Y kb/s until the end of the cycle", you have pretty much defined a limit, and should get slapped by a proper advertising regulator (FTC around here).multiply Y by the number of seconds in the billing cycle, add X, and you find the hard limit. "unlimited" is a plain lie. Saying "you can slurp as much has you can, depending on your device and the tower's capacity", is the only way to avoid setting a hard limit, and because the speed depends on the device and environment, you have offered an "unlimited" plan, in the "your actual use case sets the limit" sense.
None of which has anything to do with Net Neutrality, the death of which will soon mean that Netflix content competing with your provider's bespoke video content will get arbitrary throttled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:31PM (1 child)
Well, first, you probably don't get to vote, your representative does. Unless you are a representative, in which case voting in YOUR OWN self interest is not what you're supposed to do. (Though probably the norm.)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:05PM
It is very unfair to say that representatives vote in their own self interest.
They vote in the interest of their paying lobbyists.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:25PM
That's fine. In this case it amounts to the same thing.