Vermont becomes fifth US state to boot up its own net neutrality rules Vermont has become the fifth US state to adopt net neutrality regulations, joining Montana, New Jersey, Hawaii, and New York. State governor Phil Scott signed an executive order Thursday noting that "the principles of net neutrality are inherently tied to the provision of reliable, high-quality broadband Internet service for …
Here in the Appalachian mountains - well outside the SF bubble - the "competition" is a choice between the only wired ISP with slow and expensive DSL ($80/mo for 4/1 mbit), and satellite internet that costs even more and has nasty latency. From what I hear online, this is the norm, not like where the author is writing from (or Pai is mis-regulating from). We "little people" are getting really fed up with those who think everywhere is like where they are at the moment. One size does not fit all.
Concern for "driving customers to competitors" is a laughable idea. The big boys, who don't even come here, have pointed out to various federal agencies that they don't poach on one another's territories as is, and it's the rare place, like San Francisco - where there is any choice at all.
This is pretty much aimed at Comcast. They are the only major content owner doubling as an ISP in Vermont.
Residential DSL "competition" is provided by Fairpoint, who bought Verizon's omnishambles and has since managed only to go broke and subsequently sell themselves. They'll happily sell people 16 Mb/s service in places so far removed from the last amp they're lucky to get 768 kb in the dead of night.
How much effect this is going to have is questionable as the bulk of the State offices are in locations served by fiber providers who have no skin in the content game and barely have a presence in the residential market.
> This is how our government system is supposed to work, with problems solved in a decentralized manner at the state level.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Vermont is apparently a fairly well-run state. It recovered from 2011's Hurricane Irene without the kinds of meltdown seen in, say, Louisiana. I can personally attest to seeing the washed out mountain roads rebuilt, although some farmers are still waiting for the OK to resume planting on "contaminated" ground.
However its population of about 500,000 spread over various cities and towns isn't going to tempt most ISP's to invest, and the threat from the state legislature is correspondingly low.
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