Will California Take a Federal Broadband Deal Consumer Advocates Say Would Gut Protections?
In a world where all of California lives in wildfire country now, Gov. Gavin Newsom faces a pivotal choice.
In 2021, Congress set aside more than $42 billion through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program to connect homes and businesses without good internet service. The sum was to be divided among the states, D.C. and the territories. But last November, the Trump administration’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) added a new provision, Condition 50, which stipulates that accepting the money requires states to agree not to enforce any state law or rule that “directly or indirectly” regulates broadband service or imposes net neutrality, open access or “utility-style” rules.
Newsom faces a Monday deadline to decide whether California will accept its share of the funds. Critics say a signature from the governor could leave California unable to enforce a host of broadband consumer protections, including a ban on slowing firefighters’ data during emergencies.
“We don’t have any protections at the federal level anymore,” said Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick, who focuses on internet, communications and antitrust law. “Neither Congress nor the Federal Communications Commission are prepared to do anything to change that. And at the same time, the concentration among internet service providers has increased rapidly.”
van Schewick is one of eight law professors who signed an open letter urging Newsom not to sign the Notice of Award for California’s $1.42 billion BEAD grant while Condition 50 remains attached. According to NTIA’s dashboard, California is the last holdout.
Turning down the award could delay new internet service for about 270,000 homes and businesses, many in rural areas. But critics of Condition 50 like van Schewick want the state to sue before the deadline instead, arguing the federal government lacked authority to impose such restrictions on the funding.
In the letter, the professors argued that accepting the funds would put the award at risk every time California tried to enforce its broadband protections. The state currently has rules in place that mandate phone and internet companies keep 72 hours of backup power at their equipment in high fire-threat areas, so people can still call 911, get emergency alerts, and look up evacuation information when the power goes out.
“Even if California won every fight, each could take years to resolve,” the professors wrote. “Violations would harm Californians in the meantime, and some harms, such as those from throttling firefighters during a wildfire, cannot be undone. More likely, enforcers would back off, and providers would stop complying. At worst, courts would hold these protections unenforceable against some or most of California’s major ISPs until about 2040.”
The most dramatic example they cite: a 2019 state law passed to address situations like the one in 2018, when Verizon restricted data speeds to Santa Clara County firefighters during the Mendocino Complex Fire and restored full service only after the department paid for a more expensive plan. As KQED previously reported, the data “throttling,” first reported by the technology news site Ars Technica, forced Santa Clara County Fire Department firefighters to negotiate with Verizon for higher internet speeds while the unit’s command vehicle was serving as a communications hub for incident commanders.
Verizon later blamed the issue on a “mistake” in communicating with the fire department and said full-speed access should have been restored because the agency was responding to an emergency. The county later said it believed the slowdown was connected to the repeal of federal net neutrality laws.
The California Public Utilities Commission, van Schewick said, has been a national leader in using its own authority over broadband to protect Californians. “And that has been particularly important because the federal government has left the field,” she said, adding, “There is no cop on the beat at the federal level that can intervene if Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon block access to websites or self-hustlings to others.”
Anthony Martinez, a deputy communications director for Newsom, said Friday the office would follow up when it had anything to add.
AT&T, Comcast and Verizon did not respond to requests for comment from KQED in time for publication.
“It’s a bad deal. And this is a deliberate effort on the part of the Trump administration to tie our hands. And out of all states in this country, California has the most to lose,” said Regina Costa, who directs telecom policy for TURN, The Utility Reform Network.
Perhaps counterintuitively, opposition to Condition 50 has come from rural California as well, despite the possibility that Newsom declining the award could delay the expansion of broadband access. The state Democratic Party’s Rural Caucus and leaders of 10 Firewise communities along the lower Russian River, near where Costa lives, have urged Newsom not to sign, telling the governor in an Oct. 21 letter that their communications infrastructure is “already sketchy.”
“We are over a 10th of the population,” Costa said of California. “We have one of the largest economies of any nation-state in the world, let alone a U.S. State. We have charted our own course on many, many important things, and telecommunications is one of those areas, and we should not just sign that away,” she told KQED.