Today, the American Prospect published an analysis – “A California Democrat Is Trying to Gut the State’s Broadband Watchdog” – authored by our own Sean Gonsalves that examines a recently filed bill in California which aims to “strip telecommunications oversight authority away from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and shift it to a more easily lobbied state legislature and a hypothetical state broadband office that doesn’t yet exist.”
The piece details how the CPUC has become a national model for broadband consumer protection, extracting landmark affordability commitments from the proposed Charter-Cox merger, launching a state-funded broadband subsidy program, and administering the only public loan fund in the nation dedicated exclusively to community-owned Internet networks.
Here's a few excerpts:
“Given what the CPUC has done over the past several years to ensure that every family in California can afford internet access, Boerner’s characterization of her poison pill is enough to make Orwell blush and MAGA operatives smile.”
“To understand what’s really at stake in Boerner’s proposal, it helps to understand what the CPUC has built, mostly behind the scenes, and what would be lost.”
“On telecom issues, the CPUC is not just a passive regulator. In the words of Ernesto Falcon, branch manager of the Communications and Broadband Policy division of the agency’s Public Advocates Office, the CPUC is something closer to ‘a public defender in the regulatory space.’”
“The office employs 22 public servants—attorneys, researchers, and policy specialists—whose sole job is to advocate for California consumers in a regulatory arena dominated by monopoly telecom companies with virtually unlimited resources to influence lawmakers and set the agenda.”
“It has built real institutional muscle that has produced real results. When the federal Affordable Connectivity Program expired in mid-2024, leaving millions of low-income Californians without the $30-per-month broadband subsidy they depended on to afford internet access, the CPUC recognized it couldn’t expect a solution from D.C…”
You can read the entire story on the American Prospect website here.
