sb822

Jerry Brown doesn’t have a problem stepping into policy territory claimed by the federal government. He’s signed bills that fly in the face of Trump administration immigration policy, and carved out a place for California in international environmental diplomacy. You can add telecoms policy to that list. Yesterday, he signed senate bill 822 into law. Authored by senator Scott Weiner (D – San Francisco), it reinstates network neutrality rules that were approved by the democratic majority on the Federal Communications Commission in 2015, and quickly scrapped when republicans took over control of the FCC in 2017.… More

UPDATE 2:the Trump administration’s political hacks in the justice department were on alert – they challenged SB 822 in federal court. Quickly. Click here for more.

UPDATE: Brown approved SB 822. Click here for more.

Today is decision day for network neutrality in California. Governor Jerry Brown must either sign senate bill 822 into law, or veto it, or simply ignore it and let it become law automatically tonight, when the midnight deadline for acting passes.… More

With a week left to go before a decision is due, California governor Jerry Brown hasn’t said which side he’s going to land on in the network neutrality debate. Senate bill 822, which would restore net neutrality rules in California, is still sitting on his desk.

Brown does not give away much, if anything, when he’s considering bills. He gives bills serious thought. Some more than others, but he makes his own decisions. He’s good at balancing political, fiscal, operational and philosophical considerations.… More

California’s biggest telecoms companies – AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications and their lobbying fronts – are being very generous to the members of the assembly’s communications and conveyances committee who ripped the guts out of senate bill 822 back in June. That’s the bill, authored by senator Scott Wiener (D – San Francisco) that would restore network neutrality rules in California. If governor Jerry Brown signs it.

The damage done was reversed, after netizens went feral on the committee’s chair, assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D – Los Angeles) and democratic party leaders leaned on him.… More

Ajit Pai verbally grasped at straws to slam a California bill that would reinstate network neutrality rules. In a speech in Maine, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission snarked “I can understand how they succumbed to the temptation to regulate. After all, I suppose a broadband pipe might look to some like a plastic straw”. He was referring to Californian attempts to send plastic straws the way of the disposable bag.

Pai repeated a common argument used by industry lobbyists – that senate bill 822 would end popular free data plans – and called it “a radical, anti-consumer Internet regulation bill”.… More

A federal appellate court ruling in Minneapolis could, if its reasoning is adopted nationwide, kill any attempt by California to establish our own network neutrality rules. The court’s logic could also spell trouble for the FCC’s 2017 decision to roll back the federal net neutrality regulations it approved in 2015.

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission wanted to regulate Charter Communications voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service as if it was old school, plain old telephone service (POTS).… More

U.S. mobile broadband companies throttle video streams, according to research recently published by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After looking at data from 100,000 consumers who voluntarily downloaded a monitoring app – Wehe – the researchers identified tens of thousands of instances where video was delivered at a slower speed than other data traffic.

As related in a Bloomberg article by Olga Kharif, the big online video platforms were hit hard…

Among U.S.