WELCOME

"This legislation is a step forward at the state level

May 11, 2019 by Carolyn Mueller

"This legislation is a step forward at the state level for the broadband industry," said Sen. Michael Farley (D-Santa Monica). "It will make California the first state in the country to have net neutrality protections that protect consumers and provide a way for the Internet to flourish without the need for a single service provider."

The bill is modeled after a similar bill before California's House of Representatives last month.

In California, the FCC has had to step in with an order from the courts to prevent the state from blocking the Internet from going online without an order.

But the FCC has been reluctant to go before the telecom industry for years, arguing that the government's authority to block Internet service providers and the FCC's authority to force companies to pay fees to deliver or prioritize their traffic is "out of bounds" to the First Amendment.

In a letter to the FCC last year, Comcast, Verizon and T-Mobile argued that the law could be used to block Internet service providers' ability to provide better service to their customers.

The law would require providers to make a "limited number of reasonable efforts to comply with an applicable law or regulatory standard by setting a fixed threshold for the collection of fee amounts, or other reasonable means that may be used by the telecoms to control the performance of their service."