Now that the FCC has repealed net neutrality, let’s adopt it in California
I&#x27;m all in favour of treating Internet access as the &quot;fourth utility&quot;. It&#x27;s clear it&#x27;s become almost as essential to modern life as electricity.<p>I do however find the doom and gloom prognostications around Title II repeal to be incredibly hyperbolic and unhelpful. Fact is, Title II was only introduced in 2015. It&#x27;s not like repeal in 2017 is going to end the Internet overnight.<p>There are three problems here:<p>1. The US has a harebrained notion of &quot;competition&quot; in creating regional monopolies.<p>2. It actually doesn&#x27;t make much sense to build multiple last-mile networks. This is called an overbuild and is rather wasteful given the capex involved. It&#x27;s also why strict rules are in place for utilities: it underscores the fact that utilities are monopolies and seeks to prevent overbuilds.<p>3. ISPs have been allowed to frame the debate on peering with outright falsehoods. Specifically, the likes of Comcast claim that it&#x27;s &quot;unfair&quot; that the likes of Netflix can &quot;push&quot; data onto their network for free no less. Netflix of course isn&#x27;t pushing anything. Comcast&#x27;s customers are requesting it.<p>It&#x27;s all just a thinly-veiled attempt to stifle VOD providers to prop up dying (yet profitable) cable TV businesses. The fact that politicians aren&#x27;t able to or don&#x27;t want to see through this is both unsurprising and disappointing.<p>Adopting net neutrality laws at a state level is an interesting idea that may force Federal regulatino. I mean what&#x27;s worse that one set of Federal rules for a large company? 50 sets of state rules, that&#x27;s what.<p>Even if just CA and NY adopt this, that&#x27;s already a sizable amount of the population.