I recently noted how California’s being told by the Trump administration that it can’t enforce any of its own telecom consumer protection laws if it wants to receive $1.4 billion dollars Congress already earmarked for broadband expansion under the 2021 infrastructure bill.
That means if California wants money it was already supposed to receive from Congress, it can’t enforce its own net neutrality law, telecom privacy law, affordability metrics, reliability targets, or effectively do anything telecom monopoly giants like AT&T and Comcast don’t like for the next 14 years.
More specifically, some extremely unpopular Trump NTIA revisions to the infrastructure bill’s Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program included a little something called “Condition 50,” which would impose a 14 year moratorium on telecom consumer protection in the state. It’s just grotesque levels of corruption and regulatory capture, and it’s flown largely under the radar.
Tim Wu (Columbia), Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jack Balkin (Yale), Zephyr Teachout (Fordham), and Barbara van Schewick (Stanford) have penned a joint letter to Gavin Newsom urging him to refuse to sign the state’s BEAD notice of award agreement while Condition 50 is still attached.
Read full story at Tech Dirt.