Oct 1, 2018 —
Yesterday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law one of the strongest protections against the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality, and the move was quickly met with a lawsuit from Trump’s Department of Justice.
Up against a midnight deadline, Brown, a Democrat, signed a bill that uses Obama-era net neutrality protections as the basis for state law. Those earlier ruIes prohibited internet service providers from slowing or blocking access to websites or charging companies like Netflix extra to deliver their service faster.
The California law goes further, outlawing so-called zero-rating offers, which allow carriers to exempt certain services from counting against a user’s data cap. It also applies the net neutrality rules to so-called “interconnection” deals between network operators, something the FCC’s 2015 rules didn’t explicitly do.
California’s net neutrality efforts have long been opposed by the Trump administration, and state lawmakers like Senator Scott Wiener say they’re confident they will win the suit:
“We’ve been down this road before: when Trump and Sessions sued California and claimed we lacked the power to protect immigrants,” he said in a statement. “California fought Trump and Sessions on their immigration lawsuit — California won — and California will fight this lawsuit as well.”
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