California Senate Passes Net Neutrality Bill

California moved a step closer Wednesday to enacting its own net neutrality regulations. The state Senate approved SB 122 which restores and expands upon the federal net neutrality rules which were overturned by the FCC earlier this year. Net neutrality advocates say removing those rules leaves Internet users at the mercy of providers who can slow down charge for or even block sites when neutrality rules are not in place. However it remains unclear if states have the right to impose regulations on Internet providers when those regulations have been lifted on the national level. Joining me by Skype is State Senator Scott Wiener from San Francisco. One of the authors of the bill and Senator wiener. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. I think net neutrality is still a term people don't have a clear understanding of. Have you come up with a concise and clear definition. Well it's a fairly simple concept and that is that we as consumers should be able to decide for ourselves where we go on the internet and not have Internet service providers make that decision for us either by blocking Web sites or slowing down Web sites. It's impossible for us to use them or manipulating where we go on the Internet. Internet service providers should be built on ramps and the off ramps and they shouldn't be pushing us in different directions. What does S.P. a 22 do. SB 22 essentially adopts Obama Net Neutrality protections which were adopted in 2015 and repealed when Trump took office. We take those protections and import them into state law. We can't do it exactly the same way that the FCC enacted Net Neutrality protections. We have to do it a little bit differently but we adopt essentially the same protections. The bill prohibits telecom and cable companies from blocking or throttling Web sites from charging people for fast lanes or slow ins for example charging a company saying hey if you want your service to be able to reach our customers you have to pay a lot of money and if you don't we're going to slow down your Web site so much. No one can use it. And we also address anti-competitive consumer practices something called zero rating which the FCC also addressed. And these are free data plans that superficially look like they're pro consumer. But when you actually look at them they're very harmful to consumers and they restrict consumer choice. What is that difference between the way the federal rules can be enacted and the way the states can be enacted. I mean how can individual states mandate regulations for Internet service providers. We absolutely can and we do it in a couple of ways. First part of the bill conditions obtaining state contracts on a hearing to Net neutrality principles. These telecom and cable companies are going to have big contracts with state and local governments in California. So that's a pretty significant incentive. We also under our general police powers as a state are our powers to protect the health and safety of our residents or our economy. Businesses we have in her power to protect access to the Internet. It's at the heart of our health care system of our public safety systems of our economy. We have a state interest in regulating and of course ideally all of us believe that in an ideal world we would have one strong federal Net Neutrality protection in place. But unfortunately the federal government has completely abdicated its responsibility. It has wiped away almost all federal protections for net neutrality. And so we're now forced to act as a state and we can do that. It's not going to impact negatively people's access to the Internet. The opposition likes to say oh my god it's going to be a patchwork among the 50 states and different rules. In the end if enough states step up and say We're protecting net neutrality and you have to abide by net neutrality these providers will honor that because they're going to have to honor it. How would California's regulations be enforced. Our primary enforcement agency will be the attorney general Javier Basara is our attorney general and he is very supportive of the legislation and we're working closely with him to ensure that it's going to work from an enforcement perspective. There will also be the guilty for consumers to file an action in court if the bill has been that the law has been violated. So we have strong enforcement provisions and that's important. If this bill passes the Assembly and is signed by the governor there will probably be a legal challenge to it. Do you think it has a good chance of surviving that. I do. I believe that the bill is very defensible legally. One trumps FCC repealed net neutrality rules it issued a statement that it was forbidding states from acting to protect net neutrality. We don't believe the FCC has the power to do that. In addition Congress has never passed a law forbidding the States from acting. And as a we think we have a strong legal argument that California has the ability to protect access to the Internet for our consumers for our activists for our businesses for our health care system. We have that power. I've been speaking with State Senator Scott Wiener from San Francisco. Senator Weiner thank you very much. Thank you for having me.