Nationwide net neutrality rules that guarantee equal access to internet data for everyone are set to be rolled back at a national level on June 11—but Californians may not need to worry about that.
The senate in the country’s most populous state, which is also the world’s fifth-largest economy, voted on Wednesday to impose net neutrality rules that go even further than the Obama-era regulations imposed in 2015 but repealed by a party-line FCC vote in December.
The bill, SB 822, was given the thumbs-up by a 26-12 vote in the California Senate, but must now gain approval from the state assembly before reaching the desk of Governor Jerry Brown for his signature.
While numerous states have taken measures to protect net neutrality rules since the December FCC vote, in which the commission’s three Republicans overruled its two Democrats in abolishing the net neutrality protections, the proposed California law is the broadest of any of them. Not only would the law reinstate the Obama-era rules for internet access providers, it adds new restrictions on service providers not covered by the 2015 rules.
In addition to banning telecommunications companies from blocking or choking off traffic for some sites and offering an online “fast lane” to others, SB 822 also bars the companies, except under certain conditions, from offering free data over and above any data caps imposed by their monthly plans. As AVN.com reported on Wednesday, the so-called “zero rating” plans could cause price increases that have a disproportionate impact on low-income internet users.
But SB 822 would allow “zero rating” plans only on the condition that no company or provider pays for its data to be included in the plans. Free data plans allowed under the bill are also banned from offering access to data from specific types of sources while excluding others.
That requirement would appear to address concerns raised by the online rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which warned that zero-rating plans let big providers such as AT&T, Verizon and others “pick and choose services that don’t count against a customer’s data cap.”
In other words, by capping data use at low levels, but offering free access to certain sites but not others, the big telecom companies can effectively skirt net neutrality rules, according to the EFF analysis. But the SB 822 rules appear designed to close that loophole while still allowing service providers to provide the free data plans.
"When Donald Trump's FCC took a wrecking ball to the Obama-era net neutrality protections, we said we would step in to make sure that California residents would be protected from having their Internet access manipulated," San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener, the bill’s author, said on Wednesday. "We have a lot more work to get this bill through the Assembly, but this is a major win in our fight to reinstate net neutrality in California."
Photo by Emily Mathews / Wikimedia Commons
