California Won't Force ISPs To Offer $15 Broadband

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California lawmaker halted an effort to pass a law that would force Internet service providers to offer $15 monthly plans to people with low incomes. Assemblymember Tasha Boerner proposed the state law a few months ago, modeling the bill on a law enforced by New York. It seemed that other states were free to impose cheap-broadband mandates because the Supreme Court rejected broadband industry challenges to the New York law twice.

Boerner, a Democrat who is chair of the Communications and Conveyance Committee, faced pressure from Internet service providers to change or drop the bill. She made some changes, for example lowering the $15 plan's required download speeds from 100Mbps to 50Mbps and the required upload speeds from 20Mbps to 10Mbps. But the bill was still working its way through the legislature when, according to Boerner, Trump administration officials told her office that California could lose access to $1.86 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds if it forces ISPs to offer low-cost service to people with low incomes.

That amount is California's share of a $42.45 billion fund created by Congress to expand access to broadband service. The Trump administration has overhauled program rules, delaying the grants. One change is that states can't tell ISPs what to charge for a low-cost plan. The US law that created BEAD requires Internet providers receiving federal funds to offer at least one 'low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers.' But in new guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the agency said it prohibits states 'from explicitly or implicitly setting the LCSO [low-cost service option] rate a subgrantee must offer.' 'All they would have to do to get exempted from AB 353 [the $15 broadband bill] would be to apply to the BEAD program,' said Boerner. 'Doesn't matter if their application was valid, appropriate, granted, or they got public money at the end of the day and built the projects -- the mere application for the BEAD program would exempt them from 353, if it didn't jeopardize from $1.86 billion to begin with. And that was a tradeoff I was unwilling to make.'

Another California bill in the Senate would encourage, not require, ISPs to offer cheap broadband by making them eligible for Lifeline subsidies if they sell 100/20Mbps service for $30 or less.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.