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SALT LAKE CITY — Net neutrality ended a little over a month ago, but one Utah politician wants to bring it back to the state — sort of.
Utah House Minority Leader Rep. Brian King, D-Salt Lake City, recently opened a bill file that, if passed, would require any internet service provider that does business with the state government to adhere to principles of net neutrality. This would include any contracts with city governments, police and fire departments, school districts and other agencies or subdivisions of Utah.
“Given the recent change of position by the (Federal Communications Commission) to favor powerful ISPs over individual consumers, Utah has to take the lead to support our thriving tech industries and protect access to online information,” King said in an emailed statement.
Net neutrality ends today — at least for now
The Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines in December to repeal net neutrality. That repeal goes into effect Monday.Net neutrality became a trending issue in 2017 when the Republican-backed FCC voted along party lines to repeal the Obama-era regulations that prohibited internet service providers like Comcast or AT&T from speeding up, slowing down or blocking certain websites.
Advocates of the repeal said the regulations were hindering smaller internet providers with onerous burdens, and that the internet would flourish with a more light-touch approach that regulated the World Wide Web before net neutrality was enacted.
Proponents of net neutrality, however, are concerned that ending the regulations will turn the internet into a pay-to-play venture, where internet providers can charge data-heavy sites more for a speedier connection.
King said he wants Utah to follow in the footsteps of several other states that have brought net neutrality back on a local level, including Montana and New York — both of which require ISPs with state contracts from blocking or slowing data on their lines.
"The devil’s in the details"
But the "devil’s in the details," according to both King and Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission — a local ISP based in Salt Lake City that Ashdown said has pledged to always abide by net neutrality principles.
“This is great to put into language, that the state only has to do business with companies that believe in net neutrality, but … how are you going to enforce it? How are you going to ensure that’s actually what’s happening?” Ashdown told KSL.com.
Net neutrality is all over your social media, here’s why
If you’ve been online at any point in the last week or so, you’ve likely heard or seen something about net neutrality. If you still have questions, read on.King said the bill may instruct state agencies to place net neutrality requirements in their ISP contracts, then have the Utah Department of Technology or attorney general’s office review the contracts to confirm they’re compliant.
To ensure that ISPs are abiding by those principles, Ashdown suggested that state agencies set a standard for bandwidth and internet speed in their ISP contracts so that a random sampling of websites would show whether or not one website’s speed is being throttled if it loads at a slower speed than another’s.
Other solutions
Many, including Rep. John Curtis, believe that bringing net neutrality back on a patchwork basis across the country isn’t the best solution.
Utah’s newest-elected U.S. congressman thinks the most efficient way to deal with the issue is for Congress to rewrite the nation’s telecommunications laws from a 2018 perspective — especially since most of the laws have been around far longer than the internet and are not equipped to regulate it, he told KSL.com in June.
“I get that,” King said when asked what he thought of Curtis’ solution. “But the reality is that we have such a terrible track record in Congress of getting things done. … One of the ways of getting Congress to act is to have the states moving forward in a way that provides greater impetus for Congress to get back together and do something.”
Ashdown believes, however, that a more long-lasting solution than even net neutrality would be greater competition between ISPs.
Net neutrality protests break out at Verizon stores in Utah and nationwide
If you’ve been online at any point in the last few months or so, you’ve likely heard or seen something about net neutrality.Most people in the U.S. only have one or two internet service providers to choose from, he said, so if one of those providers is throttling the internet or not abiding by net neutrality principles, the consumer doesn’t have much of a choice but to stick with them.
“If there was robust competition and individuals and websites could choose as they will from where they wanted to get service from, net neutrality rules would be less important,” he said. “I’ve long advocated that the way we do that is through municipal fiber systems.”
But until the ISP world is less monopolistic, net neutrality regulations will have to do, he added.
King’s bill is still in the drafting stage, but the congressman hopes it will be ready for the 2019 legislative session.
“We've got a fair amount of work left to do on it, that's for sure,” he said.
