California’s net neutrality legislation has made a huge recovery. The bill had made moves through the state senate and subcommittees heavily pressured by big telecom lobbyists, but was gutted two weeks ago in the state assembly. Democratic Sen. Scott Weiner called the move “outrageous,” saying the “hostile amendments eviscerate the bill and leave us with a net neutrality bill in name only.” Things were feeling very dark, but today Sen. Weiner has claimed victory!
Under this agreement, SB 822 will contain strong net neutrality protections and prohibit blocking websites, speeding up or slowing down websites or whole classes of applications such as video, and charging websites for access to an ISP's subscribers or for fast lanes to those subscribers. ISPs will also be prohibited from circumventing these protections at the point where data enters their networks and from charging access fees to reach ISP customers. SB 822 will also ban ISPs from violating net neutrality by not counting the content and websites they own against subscribers' data caps. This kind of abusive and anti-competitive "zero rating," which leads to lower data caps for everyone, would be prohibited, while "zero-rating" plans that don't harm consumers are not banned.
The new text of the bill will not be released until the first week of August—after a month-long recess of the state’s legislature. The bill will still need to make its way through the entire state legislature again, and then get Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature—Gov. Brown has said he is a proponent of net neutrality protections. We will smile and be hopeful that the text, when released, matches up with our expectations. But, today is a good day, and the pressure applied on Democrats, to do right by the people over the big business interests of the telecommunication lobby, seems to have succeeded.
Watch the live press conference below.
