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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 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.