
Net neutrality will be enforced in New York under orders from governor - spacemanspiffy
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/net-neutrality-will-be-enforced-in-new-york-under-orders-from-governor/
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civilian
It'd be funny if all these state governments end up having trouble getting
internet.

Let's say Comcast & all the others violate net neutrality in some small ways.
(I.e. A plan where you normally have 100mbps, but youtube can go faster
because their servers are well-spliced with the internet backbone. That's a
thing that violated net neutrality.) And then-- well hey, they're violating
it. And most other businesses end up violating NN because of other
optimizations to delivering internet content.

As a cynical libertarian, I love this. There's the potential for state
government to lose internet access. That would be _so good_.

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happybit
Excessive government interference in the establishment of Internet
infrastructure is what created the ISP monopolies we have today, it surprises
me that a libertarian would be pleased to see those government-enabled
monopolies completely eliminate consumer choice. If the establishment of those
ISPs had played by free market rules and had to pay for their own
infrastructure, we would likely have an actual free market and actual choice,
and no need for net neutrality regulation in the first place. Multiple ISPs,
each in different parts of the city with overlapping coverage, and all too
afraid of each other to step on the consumer like this.

But now that the government created a situation where most of us only have one
choice in ISP thanks to using taxpayer money to build all but the last mile
and refusing to let smaller players in... Now you want the regulation to end?
Huh.

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civilian
Strawman harder! I want the government-granted local monopolies to be ended
too.

The risk I'm avoiding is not "slightly worse consumer product". The risk I'm
hoping to avoid by lobbying for anti-NN is China/Singapore/German-style
censorship.

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happybit
I should have read your comment in a more favorable light, as the community
guidelines say, so I apologize for that. I admit the image of the government
sawing off the only branch it’s standing on with regulation is humorous.

Obviously preventing speeding up video delivery with no negative impact to
quality is not the intent of Net Neutrality. The intent also, however, is not
to prevent “a slightly worse consumer product”. Corporate censorship of the
Internet for financial gain could do as much damage as government censorship
for political gain. But the common element in both cases is one party having
too much control because they’re the only game in town. And the people pushing
for “public Internet” absolutely terrify me.

That said, I don’t think preventing title II government regulation of the
Internet would prevent government censorship of it. I’d remind you how
willingly companies like AT&T worked with the NSA to enable their wiretapping
in the early stages of PRISM. They gave them a freaking secret wiretapping
room in their building with a fiber optic splitter. Why would we think they
wouldn’t be just as compliant with government censorship under similar threats
or incentives?

I have hopes for mesh Internet providers to solve all of this. Competition is
the only answer I see, and I think our philosophies align there at least.

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dv_dt
It's a welcome move but feels mostly symbolic if the article is taken
literally. The "end users" don't typically pay directly, they pay indirectly
as the services they use and pay for (say Netflix), have to pay the additional
costs and that cost is passed invisibly onto the end users when they pay for
non-ISP services.

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jlardinois
This has been true so far in the US, but there are countries where ISPs
transparently provide different bandwidths to different types of content, and
customers pick and choose service plans for each in a package deal.

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dv_dt
The transparency might be ok to choose among service plans of a single ISP,
but I suspect those other countries have a fundamental underlying commonality
that most US markets are missing. Their markets are structured via regulation,
or just happen to be currently constructed, with multiple ISP competing for
the business of the end user.

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jakeogh
New York gov wants more internet regulation. In other news; paint drys.

