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> 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. |
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.