California bill that might or might not regulate VoIP moves forward in secret

20 May 2019 by Steve Blum
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An extended ban on regulation of Internet protocol-enabled services escaped legislative limbo last week, and is moving towards a vote by the California assembly. The big question now is: what does it say? Another major broadband bill, which would have funded after school broadband access for kids who lack it, died behind closed doors in Sacramento.

Assembly bill 1366 was originally written to extend a moratorium on any attempt by the California Public Utilities Commission to regulate voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) or any other service that rides on top of a broadband connection. It’s dearly loved by lobbyists for big telcos and cable companies.

In its first hearing, in the usually AT&T-friendly assembly communications and conveyances committee, a solid wall of red t-shirt communications union members stood up to oppose AB 1366, and the bill’s author, Lorena Gonzalez (D – San Diego), and the committee chair, Miguel Santiago (D – Los Angeles), backed down immediately.

Gonzalez promised to amend the bill so that VoIP service would be regulated somehow, but not by the CPUC. So AB 1366 was sent to the powerful assembly appropriations committee, which she chairs.

On Thursday, legislative leaders met privately to decide which bills, of the hundreds that were awaiting judgement in the appropriations committees (assembly and senate), would move forward and which would be killed out of sight of the public. Not surprisingly, Gonzalez’s bill got a green light, with the terse note that it was passed “as amended”.

Those amendments were not made public before the appropriations committee vote, nor have the changes been posted to the legislature’s website since. That’s not unusual. California legislators are not subject to the same public disclosure requirements that they impose on local governments, and they take full advantage of that privilege. So we’ll have to wait until Gonzalez is ready to show her hand. That should happen in the next week or two – the assembly has an end of the month deadline to vote on AB 1366.

AB 1409 wasn’t so lucky. The appropriations committee’s verdict on it was “hold in committee”, which translate as dead on arrival. Authored by Ed Chau (D – Los Angeles), AB 1409 would have created a subsidy program to provide kids access to broadband after school, via “Wi-Fi enabled school buses or school or library Wi-Fi hot spot lending” or similar. Such “homework gap projects” would have been paid for out of rent money collected from wireless companies that lease state property and fines imposed on cable operators.