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So this is interesting; assuming that this doesn't go to the Supreme Court or is otherwise unchanged by it, it could mean that after some states implement their own laws (and fight off the inevitable lobby/lawsuits attempts to stop from from doing so ), this could go down two ways:

1) The ISPs create two (or mor) versions of their packages that they can offer/operate in different states - this would be quite expensive (and I suspect in some cases quite difficult too), but it would allow them to leech extra profit off the hides of customers not protected by state law; it would generate a bit of outrage when users see their family and friends in other parts of the country are better off, but I doubt that will make the whole system collapse

2) Or they will give in and accept the higher(highest?) standard, similar to what's happening for car emissions. I am maybe too cynical, but I doubt that will happen so easily.

Car emissions are a secondary thing for manufacturers - they can grumble, but at the end of the day it's just a bit of extra cost. The repeal of net neutrality is a matter of life or death for ISPs - it's what will make the difference between them being able to maintain outsized profits and power in their nice little oligopoly, vs becoming dumb pipes.




> The ISPs create two (or mor) versions of their packages that they can offer/operate in different states - this would be quite expensive

Why should it be expensive?

In State A, which doesn't have NN laws, you throttle Netflix until they pay you to stop doing so. In State B, which has NN laws, you don't.

It's just a matter of router configuration, isn't it? It wouldn't be totally free, but I'd imagine it could pay for itself.


ISPs tend to be rotten from the inside out. You know when you call them and it's a mess to get any help, and you inevitably get stuck explaining your basic problem 3+ times to someone who thinks wifi is magic? Yeah, it's not any better when you're an employee of those companies.


Only a few months ago did Verizon misconfigure their BGP causing a big outage. Now imagine they need to have different routing for different states. It seems like they're too incompetent to manage to best standards now, so how could we trust them to do any better? We should've considered them dumb pipes from the beginning.


Remember that time.. a few minutes ago when Verizon configured BGP correctly and nothing happened? And yesterday and the day before and the day before that, too? No? I didn’t think so.


If an ISP is indeed too incompetent to manage two configurations, nothing is stopping them from deploying the State B config everywhere, as if there were nationwide net neutrality.


This just mean that they will likely make mistakes. They can obviously configure their BGP just fine most of the times.


> The ISPs create two (or mor) versions of their packages that they can offer/operate in different states - this would be quite expensive (and I suspect in some cases quite difficult too)

I don't think this is really the case. ISP services are already very geographically fragmented since they involves so much local infrastructure. Users also (mostly) stay within state lines. Lots of ISPs already offer different pricing plans and features based on location. And there are tons of them which only operate within a specific region in the first place.

This is very different from auto manufacturing or something like Facebook which operates from a central source and will have a very hard time segmenting users by state.




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