California is on the verge of accepting $1.86 billion in federal broadband grant funds, despite the Trump administration telling states they cannot enforce net neutrality rules on any Internet service provider that gets a piece of the grant money.
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“Roughly 69 percent of California’s BEAD funding flows to five large, national providers: Comcast ($400 million), AT&T ($331 million), Verizon/Frontier ($173 million), Amazon’s Kuiper satellite service ($55 million), and SpaceX’s Starlink ($22 million),” Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick wrote today.
According to van Schewick, another casualty of the BEAD restriction would be a 2019 California law that prohibits mobile providers from throttling first responders during emergencies. The law was passed after Verizon throttled an “unlimited” data plan used by Santa Clara County firefighters during a wildfire.
“Those protections exist for a reason: left to their own devices, Internet providers have put profits over public safety before. California is now being asked to sign away those protections for fourteen years,” she wrote.