Governor Jerry Brown has two weeks to decide if California’s broadband speed standard should be slower than it is now, and if the California Advanced Services Fund should be turned into a piggy bank for AT&T, Frontier Communications and the cable industry. That’s what assembly bill 1665 would do, if Brown allows it to become law.
He’s getting plenty of encouragement to sign it, from the California Emerging Technology Fund and, one might safely assume, the platoon of lobbyists that telephone and cable companies maintain in Sacramento and back with generous cash contributions to politicians of both parties. Of course, the payments these companies make – which the chief counsel for the state’s ethics agency once described as “kind of legalised bribery” – would be dwarfed by the $300 million that AB 1665 sets aside for them.
There are groups asking the governor to veto the bill, too. The Central Coast Broadband Consortium sent an opposition letter (full disclosure: I drafted it). The North Bay North Coast Consortium sent one too, signed by Mendocino County supervisor Dan Hamburg…
AB 1665 was to re-authorize this vital and popular state broadband program, and we worked hard this year to find a sponsor and bring this bill forward after 2 failed prior attempts. A large coalition of groups came to support the “Internet For All Now” act and momentum was gained. Unfortunately, when the incumbents saw that they could not stop this bill, they were able to insert one damaging amendment after another, each worse than the last, so that eventually the original intent of the bill was lost and now our state broadband program is a give-away to the large incumbent carriers and makes it virtually impossible for the independent providers to get funded. The loss of competition that will result from this bill will be extremely damaging to California’s future.
The California Public Utilities Commission hasn’t taken a public stance on AB 1665, but a strong indicator of where commissioners might lean on it can be found in a Federal Communications Commission filing they unanimously approved on Thursday. They recommended that the FCC keep its current 25 Mbps download/3 Mbps upload speed standard in place.
That’s quite different from lowering California’s minimum speed standard to 6 Mbps down/1 Mbps up standard, as AB 1665 would do.