Justice is pursued by the Ministry of Justice for its new rule.

Since the current Federal Communications Commission has repealed the rules of the Obama era protecting internet neutrality, some states have passed laws to protect residents of Internet access providers wishing to slow down, speed up , block or otherwise control their access to websites and their use of the Web. But none has done it as dramatically as California. Following the example of Vermont, Oregon and Washington, Governor Jerry Brown enacted a bill on Sunday night that enshrines the strongest protections against abuses by Internet service providers in the country. Senate Bill 822 goes even further than the FCC rules of 2015. And as the Internet does not change when it crosses state borders, this bill could have far-reaching effects: for to comply, Internet service providers should either adhere to these strict new rules nationwide, or balkanize the web to create a separate Internet network. for the state, which might not even be possible.

California's new Internet regulation is expected to come into effect in January 2019 – but this will never happen if the federal government arrives. Barely a few hours after Brown signed the bill, senior Justice officials told the Washington Post that the federal government was considering suing California on the grounds that the new federal rules on network neutrality prohibited States create their own laws to circumvent the deregulation of the FCC. . The ministry took legal action that night, demanding an injunction that would prevent the law from taking effect, noting that internet providers "can not realistically meet a series of standards in this area for California and to another for the rest of the nation – especially when Internet communications often cross several jurisdictions. "The action continues:" This legislation would cancel the federal law across the country. "

It is very likely that the injunction can be granted as early as this week, but it may still take months before the case is tried by a judge. If the injunction is granted, then in January, the providers of Internet access again be allowed to block or strangle Internet traffic as they please, in California and elsewhere. In accordance with the FCC-led rules of internet neutrality administered by Ajit Pai, all companies must declare that they retain the right in their terms of service.

This is not the only legal battle in the battle for Net Neutrality. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, is currently the leading plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the new rules – an action that includes Etsy, Vimeo and other small Internet businesses. A group of non-profit organizations of public interest, such as the National Coalition of Hispanic Media and Free Press, also filed a complaint, as well as 23 state attorneys general who claimed that the FCC's decision to rescind the regulation on the Internet was "arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of power". The pleadings of the Mozilla Challenge are scheduled for February.

But this last front in the fight for the future of the Web could be the most decisive to date, as the new California law goes further than the rules of net neutrality of the Obama era, but even the Internet laws that other states have tried to pass on. More specifically, the California bill applies a discriminatory tactic called "zero rating", which is to favor certain websites and applications over others by not counting their use against monthly data caps. . AT & T, for example, uses zero pricing when it allows its DirecTV Now customers to look without cutting into customers' data plans. It could be argued that these schemes are good for consumers, but consumer advocates have long argued that zero valuation allows ISPs to pick winners and losers online. If watching YouTube did not count on your Verizon bill, for example, customers might be more likely to watch YouTube instead of another streaming video site like Vimeo, boosting YouTube's power over its competitors.

The FCC has tried unsuccessfully to preempt state laws before, as in 2016, under the then-President, Tom Wheeler, appointed by Obama, when the FCC lost a case to block laws in South Carolina. North and Tennessee that limited the capacity of the municipal broadband. providers to expand their networks and compete more with enterprise broadband providers, such as Comcast and Verizon. Barbara van Schewick, a Stanford Law School professor and director of the Stanford Center for the Internet and Society, says California's new law on internet neutrality is now legally sound. "An agency that does not have the power to regulate does not have the power to pre-empt states, according to case law," van Schewick said in a statement released Sunday. * "When the FCC repealed the 2015 Order on the open internet, it could not regulate broadband Internet providers. This means that the FCC can not prevent states from adopt Internet neutrality protections because the FCC's repealing order removed its power to adopt such protections. "

If California wins its lawsuit against the Justice Department, it could give the go-ahead to other state governments who also want to enact their own laws on the internet, a potential mess for websites that might be forced to comply with a multitude of rules across the country. . "There are other states that are interested in doing this," said Christopher Terry, a professor of media law at the University of Minnesota, in an interview. "So you can end up with several decisions in more than one state and these are conditions that are ripe for a Supreme Court decision to be made later," Terry said.

Ultimately, of course, the best way to dispel much of the confusion today is for Congress to enact a law regulating the question of whether Internet Service Providers are allowed to discriminate against Internet traffic that passes through. on their networks. However, congressional legislation does not materialize overnight and arouses strong public interest in the issue of network neutrality, which has been the most participatory rule-making in the history of FCC. Millions of comments have been submitted. At the FCC's repeal proposal, there is a good chance that friendly lawmakers will try to solve a political problem before clarifying the law. If more members of Congress decide to reinforce their rallying cry, as a handful of Democrats and even some Republicans are already doing, expect to hear much more about net neutrality in the near future. November.