Within hours of California Governor Jerry Brown signing the state’s landmark net neutrality law into effect on September 30, Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, slapped the state with a lawsuit declaring the new open internet law “extreme and illegal” and asking a court to strike the law down, as AVN.com reported.
But on Tuesday Washington governor Jay Inslee issued a warning to Trump, in case the DoJ brings a similar lawsuit against his state, which also enacted a state-level net neutrality law after the Federal Communications Commission tossed out a set of 2015 rules that guaranteed equal access to the internet for data from any source.
"Bring it on," Inslee told Seattle public radio station KEXP. "If the president sues us, we’ll be ready."
Washington state was also ready on June 11, when the FCC’s scrapping of the Obama-era open internet rules became final. The state passed its own net neutrality bill in February, after the FCC voted to repeal the regulations in December. On the night of June 11, just hours after the federal net neutrality rules expired, Washington’s own law took effect, as AVN.com reported at the time.
Since then, seven other states have enacted their own versions of net neutrality regulations—but only California has been hit with a Trump administration lawsuit.
Inslee on Tuesday also lauded net neutrality rules as a “bulwark of democracy.” Under net neutrality, internet service providers may not favor traffic from certain sites over others. Reasons ISPs might favor some sites over others include “paid prioritization,” which means that content providers could be charged premium fees for access to an internet “fast lane”—fees that would likely be passed on to internet users.
But censorship for political or other reasons would also effectively be permitted on an internet without net neutrality rules. For example, with four states already passing resolutions that declare online porn a “public health hazard,” governments could pressure ISPs to simply block traffic to and from porn content providers.
"We would not want a planet where a handful of media content providers with commercial interests in cable companies and internet service providers were able to stifle alternative opinions," a spokesperson for Inslee told the news site StateScoop. "Control of the media is, of course, a hallmark of authoritarian states. But that’s not how we do it here."
In addition to Washington and California, Hawaii, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont now all have some form of state-level net neutrality laws in place or waiting to take effect. But California’s law is considered the toughest and most far-reaching.
Photo by Thomas Sørenes / Wikimedia Commons
