Steve's News

A proposed state law in California would force Internet service providers to offer $15 monthly plans to people with low incomes. The bill is similar to a New York law that took effect in January but has a higher minimum speed requirement: The proposed $15 plans for low-income California residents would have to come with download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps. Broadband lobby groups fear that many states will enact such requirements after New York won a multiyear court battle to enforce its law. The Supreme Court has rejected telecom industry challenges to the New York law twice. The California bill was proposed in January by Democratic Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, but the original version simply declared an intent to require affordable home Internet service and contained no specifics on required speeds or prices. The requirement for specific speeds and a $15 price is being added to the bill with an amendment that was provided to Ars today by Boerner’s office. The amendment should be in the official record by early next week, a Boerner spokesperson said. Read full article Comments

Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google, with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers. This is just the latest phase of a campaign that has also targeted Italian ISPs and other international firms like Cloudflare. The goal is aimed at preventing illegal football streams, but the effort has already caused collateral damage. Regardless, Italy’s communication regulator praises the ruling and hopes to continue sticking it to international tech firms. The Court of Milan issued this ruling in response to a complaint that Google failed to block pirate websites after they were identified by the national communication regulator, known as AGCOM. The court found that the sites in question were involved in the illegal streaming of Series A football matches, which has been a focus of anti-piracy crusaders in Italy for years. Since Google offers a public DNS service, it is subject to the site-blocking law. Piracy Shield is often labeled as draconian by opponents because blocking content via DNS is messy. It blocks the entire domain, which has led to confusion when users rely on popular platforms to distribute pirated content. Just last year, Italian ISPs briefly blocked the entire Google Drive domain because someone, somewhere used it to share copyrighted material. This is often called DNS poisoning or spoofing in the context of online attacks, and the outcome is the same if it’s being done under legal authority: a DNS record is altered to prevent someone typing a domain name from being routed to the correct IP address. Read full article Comments