California Adopts Sweeping Net Neutrality Protections.
The nation’s largest state adopted sweeping net neutrality protections, setting up a legal showdown with the federal government over the future of the internet. California Governor Jerry Brown Sunday signed a bill banning broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content passing through their networks. Almost immediately, the Justice Department filed suit to block the law.
The California law would restore Obama-era protections the Federal Communications Commission voted to jettison last December, and in some cases, go further. For example, the California law bans broadband providers from exempting their own content from data caps while charging for data used by competitors. That will affect AT&T’s practice of exempting its DirecTV streaming video service from its mobile customers’ data limits but not data used by Dish’s Sling TV service, and other similar arrangements. The old FCC rules, by contrast, allowed the commission to investigate such deals on a case-by-case basis.
SOURCE ⇒ WIRED
