HILO — Gov. David Ige signed an executive order Monday directing state agencies to do business only with internet providers willing to contractually “abide by net neutrality principles.”
HILO — Gov. David Ige signed an executive order Monday directing state agencies to do business only with internet providers willing to contractually “abide by net neutrality principles.”
According to Ige’s office, “net neutrality bans paid prioritization of content that is seen on the internet; bans filtering or blocking of content, thus ensuring consumers unfettered access to any lawful content on the internet; and bans throttling of internet speeds for accessing certain content, which would have the same effect as blocking content.”
The Federal Communications Commission voted Dec. 13, 2017, to discontinue its 2015 Open Internet Order, which had required net neutrality nationally.
“Net neutrality protects and promotes a fast, fair and open internet,” Ige’s office said in a statement. “It prohibits internet service providers from discriminating between content or users.”
After the December FCC decision, former Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin joined 22 state attorneys general who filed a lawsuit to block the FCC from what the attorneys general called the “illegal rollback of net neutrality.”
Opponents of net neutrality say it stifles innovation because it prevents companies from choosing their preferred methods of operating.
Proponents of net neutrality, though, argue it keeps everyone on a level playing field in terms of access to information and availability of web service.
A University of Hawaii at Hilo spokesperson was not available late Monday. The state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs declined comment.
Email Jeff Hansel at jhansel@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
State censorship is the ultimate result. It is a semantic deception.
“Proponents of net neutrality, though, argue it keeps everyone on a level playing field in terms of access to information and availability of web service.”
Translation:
“Proponents of net neutrality, though, believe everyone should be forced to pay the same high price to subsidize the 3% of users that use 70% of the services.”
Hmm… weird… Democrats in favor of subsidizing the evil (internet) rich…
Every version of net neutrality I’ve seen already allows for higher charges for higher bandwidth utilization, even though in practice the marginal cost of extra bandwidth is next to nothing.
The rest of that quote makes no sense from either a technical basis or business practice basis. The pipe costs what the pipe costs. Once you’ve paid for it, the only person who should be able to tell you what to run through it is you.
That goes double when the marketing messages you signed up to listed only a price per capacity, nothing about “that 20 megabits we sold you is actually only usable with the services we pre-selected for you (meaning got paid on both ends for), good luck using anything else.”
And it goes triple when you have a limited choice of service providers, because the government issued a monopoly in terms of who could run that coax cable to your home. I’m all for free markets but once the government eliminates competition, it needs to take responsibility for that decision by managing the market it granted exclusivity in.
Its not the government which provides the coax cable to your home! We had to lay 600 feet for a friend. The situation in Hawaii/US is weird. Europe/Asia go up to a gigabit speed for 9 USD!!! Of course if you don’t mind that one person – the CEO – gets it all.
On the Big Island – if you are lucky – you live in an area served with Hawaiian Telecom DSL speeds up to 6.2 megabit. Which is enough to do what you want to do. The price for this package is half of that what cable offers.