Jonathan Spalter is the CEO of Ustelecom, a telcoms lobby group funded by AT&T and Verizon; in an op-ed on the lobbyists' site, he threatened to "aggressively" sue any state that passes net neutrality rules. Read the rest
Washington State was the first to pass a true Net Neutrality law that restored all the public protections the FCC withdrew when it killed Net Neutrality late last year; the move is symbolically awesome but legally fraught, seeking to redefine the line where the FCC's authority stops and the states' authorities start. Read the rest
In Packets, Please, you are the boss of CosmoCast, a corrupt, post-Net Neutrality ISP; your job is to "boost, throttle or disconnect" people based on their activities -- you can boost Trump's tweets, disconnect political dissidents, and throttle rival video-on-demand services, working at breakneck speed to keep the packets flowing in the way that optimizes the internet for your shareholders at the expense of your users. Read the rest
Rhode Island Democratic state Senators Frank Ciccone (@senatorciccone) and Hanna Gallo (@hannagallo27) have proposed grandstanding, unworkable legislation, "Relating to Public Utilities and Carriers—Internet Digital Blocking" which would mandate the state's ISPs to identify all the pornography on the internet, and then block it for all Rhode Islanders, unless those Rhode Islanders specifically requested their porn to be unblocked and paid $20 for the privilege. Read the rest
The annual CPAC freakshow reached a new absurdist peak last week when Trump FCC Commissioner was awarded the NRA's Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award for his cowardly back-shooting of America's most beloved policy, the sweet and tender Net Neutrality. Read the rest
Calling the FCC's decision to kill Net Neutrality the "road to serfdom" Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] introduced the legislation he'd co-sponsored with Senator Ed Markey [D-MA] to restore Neutrality. Read the rest
It's CPAC! The annual far-right hootenanny for preppers, false-flaggers, climate deniers, truthers, and the sort of person who closes their eyes and thinks of The Fountainhead, featuring Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of France, Nigel Farage, Sean Hannity, and mass-murder enthusiast Wayne LaPierre. Read the rest
When Facebook was desperately trying to game the Indian regulatory process to get approval for its "zero-rating" system (where it would bribe Indian ISPs to give it the power to decide which services would be free to access, and which would be capped and metered), one of the frequent arguments in favor of this "poor internet for poor people" was that the Wikimedia Foundation had struck similar deals in poor countries around the world, freeflagging Wikipedia use on networks that were otherwise strictly capped and metered. Read the rest
Facebook and Google's parent company Alphabet are among the tech giants pushing a congressional bid to reverse the Trump administration's plan to repeal Obama-era Net Neutrality rules that protect the open internet. Read the rest
First it was Montana, then New York, then California -- and now New Jersey has become the latest state to enact state-level Net Neutrality rules in defiance of Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who not only killed Net Neutrality despite the obvious fraud and deceit in the regulatory process, but also insists (as his Democratic predecessor, Tom Wheeler, did) that states do not have the right to override federal communications policy. Read the rest
The FCC's order killing Net Neutrality in December 2016 also includes a prohibition on states making their own telcoms rules that restore it (this is a mixed bag -- if states' rights don't permit them to overrule the FCC, then a future FCC that reinstates a Net Neutrality order could stop states whose governments are captured by telcoms lobbyists from subverting it), and states have fought back though a loophole: the governors of Montana and New York have issued executive orders banning non-Neutral ISPs from doing business with the government; but in California, the State Senate just went further. Read the rest
Days after Montana Democratic Governor Steve Bullock signed an executive order banning ISPs that violate Net Neutrality from supplying state government agencies, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (also a Democrat) has followed suit, with an even stricter executive order. Read the rest
Burger King's video on "Whopper Neutrality" (see Carla's earlier post) -- an analogy to explain Net Neutrality that's also obviously a marketing campaign for Burger King -- is a surprisingly great explainer, but even more importantly, it's an important bellwether for corporate America's perception of public support for Net Neutrality. Read the rest
Municipal networks are cheaper and faster than the ones that cable and telephone duopolists build after being given exclusive franchises to serve cities, which is why the FCC had to issue an order banning cities to stop building them -- in the absence of such an order, it seems likely that most of America would end up using municipal internet connections (unlike today, when 100,000,000 Americans are served by a single ISP). Read the rest
In order to ram through its Neutrality-killing bill, the FCC had to break all the rules: ignoring expert testimony, inventing an imaginary alternate internet where Neutrality didn't matter, pretending millions of obviously fake comments were real, obstructing justice when law-enforcement tried to investigate these comments, pretending the evidence supported neutracide, lying about how the Obama FCC created its Neutrality order, and lying about what happened after the order was passed. Read the rest
Governor Steve Bullock [D-MT] has signed an executive order banning state agencies from procuring internet service from ISPs that violate net neutrality principles like throttling, blocking and paid prioritization. Read the rest
