Yesterday, the California Senate passed S.B. 822, voting 23-12 on party lines; the bill restores strong Net Neutrality protections to the state by banning ISPs from providing services to government entities if they engage in throttling, paid prioritization, zero-rating or other discriminatory practices.
States and cities have led the fight to restore Net Neutrality ever since Trump’s FCC chairman Ajit Pai rammed through a repeal of the Obama-era rules. Oregon already passed a similar bill, 21 State Attorneys General are suing the FCC over the rule; more than 100 cities have pledged to boycott any ISP that practices network discrimination, while New York, Montana, New Jersey, and North Carolina have proposed legislation similar to California’s SB 822 (Washington state went even further and passed a bill banning non-Neutral ISPs from doing business in the state, period).
Meanwhile, the US Senate has voted to overturn Pai’s rule and you can help get the same deal through Congress.
The bill would reinstate rules similar to those in the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. It forbids ISPs from throttling or blocking online content and requires them to treat all internet traffic equally.But the bill also takes the original rules further by specifically banning providers from participating in some types of “zero-rating” programs, in which certain favored content doesn’t contribute to monthly data caps.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a statement on Tuesday that called the bill “a gold standard for states looking to protect net neutrality.”
California Senate votes to restore net neutrality [Makena Kelly/The Verge]
(via /.)