When the legislative dust settled on Friday, after a whirlwind morning in which the fate of hundreds of bills were announced after being decided behind closed doors in Sacramento, assembly bill 1366 remained alive. Carried by assembly member Lorena Gonzalez (D – San Diego) would, on the face of it, simply extend an existing ban on regulation of “Internet Protocol enabled communications services”, including voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephone service.
Given the increasing number of consumers switching – and being switched without their consent – from legacy copper-based plain old telephone service (POTS) to VoIP since the regulatory ban went into effect six years ago, AB 1366 spells a de facto end to state oversight of broadband and telephone infrastructure and service in California. As presently written, AB 1366 has a few exceptions to the broad prohibition on state or local VoIP regulation, but doesn’t say how those will be enforced. According to the most recent legislative staff analysis of the bill, it “places these provisions in a portion of the Business and Professions Code over which no board at the Department of Consumer Affairs has oversight…As a result, lawsuits brought by the Attorney General may be the only mechanism to enforce these provisions”.
AT&T deployed its cash, lobbyists and astroturf non-profit groups to argue for the bill, with universally similar support from Frontier Communications, Comcast and other cable, telephone and mobile companies. So far, it has prevailed over objections from organised labor, the California Public Utilities Commission and the Newsom administration. The seven members of the California senate’s appropriations committee – five democrats and two republicans – unanimously voted in favor of the bill, and passed it on to the senate floor without new amendments.
There’s less than two weeks left in the California legislature’s 2019 regular session, with a soft deadline of the end of this week to amend bills, and a hard, constitutional deadline of next Tuesday. The question will be whether Gonzalez listens to her (otherwise) allies in organised labor – particularly the Communications Workers of America union – and tries to find new language they will accept, or simply sends the current version on to a vote by the full senate.