SACRAMENTO, Calif.—California Governor Jerry Brown had a deadline of Sunday to sign the state’s landmark new net neutrality law, regarded as the nation’s most far-reaching state-level law protecting an open internet, and without any comment, Brown finally affixed his signature to the bill on Sunday.
Within hours, the Donald Trump administration, through United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions, slapped the governor and the state with a lawsuit in a Sacramento federal court to stop the net neutrality law from taking effect, according to a report by NBC News.
Net neutrality on the federal level was abolished in June, and this new law is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2019, but the U.S. Justice Department lawsuit asks the court to block the law with a preliminary injunction, on the grounds that the big telecom companies that control internet access for most Americans “cannot realistically comply with one set of standards in this area for California and another for the rest of the nation—especially when internet communications frequently cross multiple jurisdictions."
The Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal Obama-era net neutrality laws last December. The federal rules put in place under President Obama prevented internet service providers from giving traffic from certain sites high-speed priority access while slowing or blocking traffic from other sites. But on August 31, as AVN.com reported, the California legislature passed its own net neutrality law, which would apply to internet companies operating in the nation’s most populous state.
The Trump-appointed FCC Chair, Ajit Pai, slammed the new California law as “illegal” in a speech earlier this month, and his language was echoed by Sessions in a statement on Sunday.
“Under the Constitution, states do not regulate interstate commerce—the federal government does,” Sessions said. “Once again the California legislature has enacted an extreme and illegal state law attempting to frustrate federal policy.”
But California Attorney General Xavier Becerra vowed to fight the lawsuit and put the law into effect, saying, according to Yahoo! News, that the state that serves as home base to many of the country’s largest and most powerful tech firms, “will not allow a handful of power brokers to dictate sources for information or the speed at which websites load."
The lawsuit, however, will likely end up in the United States Supreme Court, and while the positions of the eight justices currently seated on the court regarding the constitutionality of state-level net neutrality laws are not yet clear, current Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—who would hold a fifth and deciding vote on a court now split evenly between its “liberal wing” and “conservative wing”—is on the record as an outspoken foe of net neutrality laws, writing in a case before the Washington D.C. appeals court last year that the Obama-era rules were “unlawful” and “must be vacated.”
In his confirmation hearing earlier in September—prior to the current sexual assault allegations him surfacing—Kavanaugh attempted to explain his anti-net neutrality opinion, saying he was “bound by precedent” to follow what he called the court’s “major rules” doctrine. In other words, that the court should throw out laws which lack a clear statement by Congress of the intentions behind the laws.
But technology law expert Gigi Sohn, who helped put the Obama-era rules into place, said in an essay for NBC News that Kavanaugh was simply making up the so-called “major rules” doctrine.
“His theory on ‘major rules’ also directly contradicted Supreme Court precedent,” Sohn wrote. “In a 2005 decision, the court ruled that the FCC has the discretion to decide how and under what part of the Communications Act broadband providers should be regulated.”
Photo By Neon Tommy / Wikimedia Commons
