NY Gov Cuomo Pledges State Net Neutrality Legislation for 2020

After a federal court ruling in October cleared the way for states to impose their own net neutrality laws, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Thursday pledged what he called the country’s strongest such law as part of his 2020 legislative agenda. In 2018, after the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal the Obama-era federal net neutrality rules, Cuomo signed an executive order requiring any internet service provider that does business with the state to adhere to open internet standards. But his proposal issued on Thursday goes well beyond his previous order. The bill would “prevent the blocking, throttling and paid prioritization of online content,” rules that are the core of net neutrality standards. In other words, ISPs cannot selectively slow or block traffic from any site or data source, while favoring others. Without net neutrality, ISPs are free to block sites—such as porn sites—and then charge customers additional fees to access them. The proposed New York legislation would also ban “zero rating.” That’s the practice of exempting certain services from a customer’s data plan, essentially allowing unlimited access high-data services such as video streaming sites at no extra charge. While “zero rating” may sound good in theory, in practice it allows ISPs to “zero rate” services they own, while capping access to others. As TechCrunch reported, Comcast recently did exactly that with a streaming on-demand service called “Stream It,” which allowed customers to watch Comcast-controlled content at no extra charge while competitors such as Netflix and YouTube remained capped, incurring significant user charges for exceeding the limits. The FCC’s net neutrality repeal attempted to specifically ban states from imposing their own net neutrality laws, saying that the federal rules “pre-empted” any state laws or regulations. But in a lawsuit by Mozilla—makers of the web browser Firefox—and other tech forms and public interest groups that sought to overturn the FCC net neutrality repeal, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled that while the FCC had the right to repeal the 2015 rules, its “pre-emption” claim was not valid. The ruling effectively gave the green light to states to put their own net neutrality rules in place, as Cuomo is proposing for New York. Photo by Pat Arnow / Wikimedia Commons