What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States.
Think about it: these are service plans offered through cables that already exist, and that cross defined borders right? But what all an ISP has to do to offer different service plans in California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona is to merely offer different terms to different people based off the State they reside in. That’s just paperwork (and you know, delivering on the agreed upon service for the agreed upon price), not automobiles.
So I don’t really buy the argument that because California did a thing, ISPs couldn’t do all the supposed bad evil stuff they were going to immediately do once the FCC failed to “save the internet” anywhere else (although maybe other States also did the thing California did).
Users in California may download from a service in New York. Users in New York may download from a service in California. I suspect it would be more expensive than it's worth to have asymmetric infrastructure that would allow them to them to throttle the New Yorker without violating the law for the Californian.
All that network management would require teams of engineers and specialized hardware, all for something that may change on a whim and be obsoleted. What if New York copies California law? Bam. That investment instantly evaporated.
It's probably not worth it to add in a whole bunch of BS just to try to make a bit more money in maybe Fl and Tx.
Especially given the fact that it's not as straightforward as it seems - and legal consequences could easily outweigh any benefits.
On top of that, I'd be surprised if ISPs tried to throttle traffic even in Fl and Tx and people in those states didn't pressure their government to ban it as well.
> Net neutrality is wildly popular with the public.
I didn’t say it explicitly but I think this is the real reason that the ISPs largely haven’t changed their business practices independent of what the FCC says it can or can’t do. They don’t want the FCC in their shit, but they also don’t plan to do all of the worst case scenarios envisioned in say, this video from 2006: https://youtu.be/cWt0XUocViE
> Netflix ultimately paid ISPs for interconnection but the dispute had an impact on the FCC's net neutrality proceedings. The FCC didn't ban interconnection payments but set up a complaint process so that companies like Netflix can challenge specific payment demands as being "unjust" or "unreasonable." There have been no major public disputes since then.
So I mean, I get it. In 2006 it was easy to see how turning the Internet into cable TV would be terrible, but if that was ever a danger, it probably isn’t now? And the internet is so much more important now that if it ever did look like that was going to happen, we could pass a real law then. In the mean time I’m going to enjoy listening to the court proceedings when the FCC is sued because they said they didn’t have the power to govern ISPs when they had a different set of commissioners.
> Net neutrality is wildly popular with the public.
In the tech bubble.
Outside of the bubble you will be hard pressed to find people able to actually articulate what net neutrality is. And those people are easily swayed by partisan means: ('The democrats want more government regulation that's going to increase your internet and wireless bills') ISP's only have to claim 'your costs have gone up due to new government rules preventing us from selling discounted service' or something to that effect and you will find that 'widespread' support eroding away.
Average Joe and Jane consumers are quite familiar with data limits, more expensive access to highspeed data, throttled data based on arbitrary stuff, etc. People may not have heard of net neutrality, but that doesn't mean the basic concepts are over their head.
"AT&T could choose to throttle your streaming data when you don't use their partnered app to watch sports on your phone" cuts through the BS pretty directly.
Same way California auto standards impact auto standards across the entire country. California is the most populous state with a higher disposable income. At some point, creating a product specifically for 12% of the US population with money to spend while maintaining a separate product for the rest of the country becomes too much of an economic burden and the standard gets applied across the board instead.
> What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States.
What I've never understood is the argument that what Europe does regarding privacy could actually affect the privacy of other countries.
Sure, some websites detect your location and apply different rules to you but a lot end up just following GDPR and apply it universally because it is easier and cheaper to do that than do a "means testing" and apply specific rules. Creating all those rulesets makes for an increasingly complex system, makes it more prone to error (which includes doing those banned actions within California and resulting in a lawsuit), and just is overall more expensive. Determining country origin is presumably a lot easier than determining state origin too. Not to mention that California is the most populous state and the biggest tech sector. Pretty much the argument is ISPs have bigger fish to fry when they're restricted from doing something to a large portion of their customers.
No one and nothing are truly independent. That's always been a lie being sold. Choices you make affect others and choices collectively made affect you. It's literally the definition of a society. On HN we have these discussions about Chrome's dominance allowing them to have control over how the internet is structured. We've had these discussion about Apple's dominance influencing right to repair. And so on. Monolithic forces are never going to be stopped by single player boycotting. My usage of Firefox for over a decade never did anything to dethrone Chrome and I never expected it would, but hey, it also can't happen without people like me. Just needs to happen at a larger scale.
When you sign up with an ISP, you’re signing up for a guaranteed service at a physical location with defined jurisdictional borders and laws governing it. My ISP throttling their New York customers who try to use Netflix isn’t going to affect me. Honestly throttling their Oregon customers wouldn’t either.
This is factually different from Facebook who serves people independent of their location, residence or citizenship and don’t give a fig about who your ISP is because laws might cover someone based on any or all of those whereas a Californian who invades Texas is no longer covered by California-specific consumer protection laws, and to the extent that businesses choose to adhere to them in Texas is incidental. ISPs are very much bound by the location they setup infrastructure in in the way that the services you access through that connection are not as evidenced by the fact that they already take into account your residential address when determining 1. if they can service your location at all and 2. what services and what quality guarantees they can make to you.
Also just to make a note on GDPR, one of the screwy things about it is that covers EU citizens. EU citizenship is a complicated enough thing, but there’s a lot of people with EU citizenship living elsewhere in the world. Fully complying with GDPR is a much more onerous requirement in terms of infrastructure and professionals you need to hire than ISPs complying with a net neutrality law in one State. I’m not saying there’s no additional overhead, it probably is easier to have contracts that are as standard across as many markets as possible, but ISPs are already skilled at working within local jurisdictional requirements.
> When you sign up with an ISP, you’re signing up for a guaranteed service at a physical location with defined jurisdictional borders
It's messier than that. This works if all NY, OR, <whatever state> gets its traffic distributed through a guaranteed hub in those locations. Specifically when you know the end point of the user. Let's just take the simple case and say a Google employee sitting in a CA office is working with a Microsoft employee sitting in a WA office and assume OR has a throttling service. The hubs along the way are Seattle, Vancoover, Portland, Eugene, Redding, SF. Do the Portland and Eugene servers throttle? To do this they'd need to know: 1) the source destination, 2) the final destination, 3) the type of traffic, 4) the type of service, and so on. Are they going to have that? Probably not. And then it'd be trivial to get around if you start using encrypted traffic and encrypted DNS services. The ISPs just can't do that wish such granularity that they don't risk being sued by CA.
> Also just to make a note on GDPR, one of the screwy things about it is that covers EU citizens.
A note on the CA thing, the DOJ and several ISP lobby groups tried to get CA's law overturned at a federal level immediately after it was passed. It's been upheld. So they kinda already looked at a solution that strongly implies what the parent implied about other states likely implementing similar laws were the ISPs to start such fuckery.
CA here isn't just acting as a filter in that they do a thing and so having to work around them is more cost than its worth. They are _also_ an example, where they tried to get the laws overturned and failed. So they don't want to get any more similar laws in other states because that will have even more of an effect and tighten what they can do even further.
ISPs are already rate-limiting users based off the service tier they paid for. If you’re paying for 250 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, you’re not getting the 1 Gbps down 5 Mbps up connection that your neighbor is offering. If you choose to upgrade to the 1 Gbps plan, you’re using the same equipment over the same wire.
Choosing to then sell you an additional premium option where you get the full 1 Gbps you theoretically could get but don’t already pay for, but they’ll give it to you for a selection of curated services including their own is possible, and to incentivize you to not use a VPN, they won’t count it against your data cap when you access Netflix at 4K on 4 screens simultaneously because you’re now a VIP customer—all of that would violate the spirit of net neutrality. T-Mobile already does similar things as a “bonus” for their customers and technically, it’s not net neutral. There’s all kinds of ways to discriminate between paying customers, and that was the original fear of not having net neutrality: that the internet would become just like cable TV. That hasn’t happened with or without net neutrality as law (or as an FCC rule at least). Pretty much most markets have explicit data caps on some ISPs at least now, but the way it started was ISPs rolled that out slowly, over the course of years, market by market.
You are correct that other States could pass similar laws. I don’t follow the politics of other States much, but if California can do it, so can they, but other States can’t rely solely on the fact that California did a thing and now they don’t have to bother taking any legislative action themselves, if it’s important anyway (and I’m not convinced this particular issue counts as important). California even won in Federal court, great! There’s precedent for it now, but that doesn’t mean ISPs would necessarily lose in a different circuit, and they could always force a circuit split in a friendlier district.
I know for a fact there are tech companies that build out separate systems for EU and US data pipelines. It's not really a big deal to have a lawyer look over the data that's being collected and flag stuff as can be collected in Europe, and can be migrated to the USA for processing. Companies generally run EU-specific infrastructure anyway. GDPR is honestly one of the easier aspects of operating in Europe.
> I know for a fact there are tech companies that build out separate systems for EU and US data pipelines.
Great, me too. I thought it was clear in my first sentence...
>> Sure, some websites detect your location and apply different rules to you but a lot end up just following GDPR and apply it universally because it is easier and cheaper to do
The FCC declared that it didn't have authority to regulate net neutrality. When they did, California declared that if it's not in-scope for the FCC, then there's no federal-state conflict in California regulating it themselves.
Parent is saying that California may not have the legal authority to regulate the internet in that way, since some powers are given only to the federal government.
Whether they do or do not have the authority isn't something that can be answered by anything but speculation until it's been tested in court, and I don't think any of the ISPs had enough to gain through packet prioritization that it was worth the risk of going to court.
"Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously in January 2022 that California's net neutrality law may continue to be enforced and cannot be overridden by the FCC as, current as of the decision, Internet services were classified as information services."
There's still one more higher court that can overturn that decision - SCOTUS. They could conceivably rule that no government agency, state or federal, has the ability to enforce such regulations.
Exactly. Even if their laws only technically apply within California, no car maker is going to build a car that cannot be legally sold in the single largest market in the US. It gets even more difficult with the internet as there are few internet providers who don't have at least some kind of connection to California and therefore fall under its jurisdiction, and ensuring you only apply prioritization to packets that don't involve California is extremely tough.
These emissions regulations don't cover just California, but most of New England, the Pacific, and the mid-Atlantic states as well. I think New York has a way to "fast track" new emissions laws from California, so that the states are kept in sync.
"California cars" were a thing in the early days when emissions were difficult to comply with. Even modern cars come with a "50-state compliant emissions" line item on the window sticker.
If California ratcheted up emissions standards too high, there's the possibility that such segregation could emerge again, particularly when it comes to trucks. There are already several trim levels of trucks that are specific to Texas, because the market there is so big. I could see a truck coming with a sticker that says, "RAM TRX can not be registered or sold in CA, WI, NY, [...] due to emissions restrictions."
> I thought the internet was purely a federal law domain
It is not, there are plenty of state laws that have applied to the internet. On the specific issue of net neutrality, the FCC in 2019 lost in the D.C. Circuit in its attempt to assert that state law regulations for neutrality were preempted, specifically because the repeal rested on them reclassifying in a way which means they don’t have the power to preempt state regulations.
> It looks like this law was challenged on those grounds
It was (EDIT: well, not on the broad “internet is a federal law domain” grounds, but the narrower “net neutrality regulations by the states were preempted by the terms of the FCC neutrality repeal” grounds), by multiple parties, and those challenges failed.
> but the challenge lasted until after Biden was elected and the suit dropped.
No, while the DoJ dropped its case then, the case making the same arguments by the broadband industry continued until the industry participants dropped it after the Ninth Circuit ruled (similar to what the D.C. Circuit had previously), that by reclassifying broadband under Title I in its net neutrality repeal, the FCC had removed its ability to restrict state regulations, which would only exist if it were regulated under Title II.
Why would you think it was a federal law domain? The federal government is technically only allowed to do what is granted in the Constitution. The 10th amendment says anything else is left to the states. Last I checked nothing in the constitution mentioned the internet. Not that the federal government lets that stand in their way.
Like the other comment said, the internet is basically as interstate as a thing can get by design.
The interstate commerce clause is extremely broadly interpreted. It can, for example, be used to prevent a farmer from growing grain on their own farm to feed their own cattle that reside on that very farm(Wickard v. Filburn)
I think Wickard vs Filburn is one of the worst decided cases out there. If I live in California and visit a website hosted in California there is no reason why there should be any interstate commerce involved.
That is possible, but not guaranteed. I don't think the federal government has any authority to regulate the traffic that remains in one state only the traffic that goes through another state. I would also mention that not all traffic would be commerce as well. Going to HN isn't commerce so I don't think the federal government would have any authority even if the traffic crosses state boundaries unless it is genuinely commerce.
Yet it can’t be used to stop California vehicle emission standards, which is why almost all car manufacturers in the US make cars up to California’s higher standards, because they’re so big.
In fairness, while I detest that California's laws become de facto national laws, it doesn't seem appropriate to use the commerce clause there. California isn't trying to regulate interstate commerce, it's not their fault that manufacturers are too cheap to have different models that meet California's standards while having a normal model for the rest of the country.
Not a lawyer, but I found an explanation about why states can pass net neutrality laws. Communication over the internet has both interstate and intrastate components. More on the intrastate component later. The Commerce Clause gives Congress authority to pass legislation to regulate interstate commerce [1]. Congress can also delegate a portion of its authority to federal agencies such as the FCC.
What happens when the FCC chooses to abandon its authority to regulate ISPs? More specifically, what happens when the FCC chooses to deregulate the ISPs by reclassifying broadband from Title II to Title I? Then the FCC cannot preempt state laws regarding telecom unless Congress gave it an authority to do so. In Mozilla Corp. v. FCC, 940 F. 3d 1 (D.C. Cir., 2019), the FCC tried to argue that it could preempt state net neutrality laws [2].
Quoting the page 132 of the case text PDF (which you need to download to ctrl-F, since Justia's PDF viewer messes up whitespace between words) [3][3.5]:
> Third, the Commission points to 47 U.S.C. § 160(e). That provision says that “[a] State commission may not continue to apply or enforce any provision of [the Act] that the Commission has determined to forbear from applying under subsection (a).” Subsection (a), in turn, gives the Commission some flexibility to forbear from regulating technologies classified under Title II. Id. § 160(a).
> That Title II provision has no work to do here because the 2018 Order took broadband out of Title II. So the Commission is not “forbear[ing] from applying any provision” of the Act to a Title-II technology. 47 U.S.C. § 160(e). On top of that, Section 160(e)—as a part of Title I—does not itself delegate any preemption authority to the Commission. People of State of Cal., 905 F.2d at 1240 n.35.
In short, the FCC gave up its authority to preempt state net neutrality laws the moment the FCC reclassified broadband from Title II to Title I.
There's another important point which starts on page 134 and continues to page 135 [3.5]. (If you want to ctrl-F it, you'll have to select just the first few words because page breaks in the PDF obstruct paragraphs.)
> Not only is the Commission lacking in its own statutory authority to preempt, but its effort to kick the States out of intrastate broadband regulation also overlooks the Communications Act’s vision of dual federal-state authority and cooperation in this area specifically.
Meanwhile, back on page 126 [3.5]:
Section 152 of the Communications Act provides, as relevant here, that “nothing in this chapter shall be construed to apply or to give the Commission jurisdiction with respect to * * * regulations for or in connection with intrastate communication service by wire or radio of any carrier.” 47 U.S.C. § 152(b). That provision divides regulatory authority “into two separate components: interstate communications, which can be regulated by the [Commission]; and intrastate communications, which cannot.”
Therefore, states actually have Congress's blessing to regulate broadband to some degree: states have authority over communications confined within the respective states.
So what about the Dormant Commerce Clause, which prohibits states from "passing legislation that discriminates against or excessively burdens interstate commerce" [1]? I don't know whether courts have come to an answer about whether state net neutrality laws violate the Dormant Commerce Clause. So instead I'll pose food for thought: To what degree do you think state net neutrality laws burden interstate commerce? Is the burden excessive? Net neutrality means that an ISP can't restrict traffic on the grounds of content, senders, and recipients [4]. What kind of burden does that place on an ISP which offers internet in multiple states?
I don’t know the specifics of federal authority when it comes to internet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it fell under interstate commerce, which is how they justify federal drug laws.
I can live in California and visit a site in California and my traffic might not leave the state. That is pretty much irrelevant now that Wickard v. Filburn is a thing though.
Internet communications which exit/enter the state do, but there's still the issue of communications which stay within the state. The states have Congress-given authority to regulate intrastate (not interstate) internet communications. Moreover, by reclassifying broadband from Title II to Title I, the FCC gave up the part of its authority that allowed it to preempt state net neutrality laws. I wrote more on this technicality in a different comment [1].
Even when conduct could Constitutionally be regulated by the federal government under the Commerce Clause, that doesn't preclude state regulation unless Congress has (1) specificallly regulated that states may not regulate, or (2) has regulated in a way which the State regulations at issue would fundamentally conflict with.
So, yes, the internet is Constititionally a thing the federal government can regulate, but that doesn't make it Constitutionally a thing state governments can not regulate.
I can live in California and visit a site in California and my traffic might not leave the state. That is pretty much irrelevant now that Wickard v. Filburn is a thing though.
The lawsuits over the FCC repeal, the California law, proposed laws in other states, and the Presidential election and the expectation that the FCC would revisit the issue and readopt neutrality regulations (and that any major conduct violating the neutrality principles made that both more likely and would be specifically targeted in the new regulations) all contributed to restraint.
Think about it: these are service plans offered through cables that already exist, and that cross defined borders right? But what all an ISP has to do to offer different service plans in California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona is to merely offer different terms to different people based off the State they reside in. That’s just paperwork (and you know, delivering on the agreed upon service for the agreed upon price), not automobiles.
So I don’t really buy the argument that because California did a thing, ISPs couldn’t do all the supposed bad evil stuff they were going to immediately do once the FCC failed to “save the internet” anywhere else (although maybe other States also did the thing California did).