Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/02/25/federal-judge-gives-california-go-ahead-to-enforce-net-neutrality.html
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One of the things I learned reading the book Tubes (I recommend it) is that, actually, there never really has been “net neutrality” of the sort many people might assume existed at one point. There have always been back-end agreements between different private sector companies that lead to more or less bandwidth between various providers’ services and networks.
Now, I’m all for regulation that mandates ISPs are simply not allowed to prioritize bits for their own services above third party services, for instance, Comcast NBC Universal making it so Xfinity customers can only watch high quality videos on their own streaming services including Peacock. They don’t advertise that way, they advertise based on “this is your bandwidth, and this is your data cap.” Clearly treating their own bits (or bits from a partner company) with priority that leads to a degradation of third party services is horrible and absolutely a misleading practice.
However, I think it’s important to realize that our framework for how this is done really needs to be approached from the ground up. There never was a net neutrality promised land that we should be striving to return to. And net neutrality has not, really, been a “truth” to how the internet has behaved and literally been wired, behind the scenes, for decades.
Here’s the Andrew Blum book, which again, is a great read. And yes, the title is base don that infamous quote form some American politician that referred tot he internet as a “series of tubes.” The irony is that after exploring it, Blum found that indeed, much of the internet is a series of literal tubes. 
As an aside, not sure why I’m getting errors when the preview is being generated. Did Australia come after bb with a link tax or something? 
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