Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Ash Kuzarian. On today's show, we're going to talk about California's net neutrality bill and if it's constitutional or not.

Last week, Governor Jerry Brown of California has signed the bill into law that many call one of the toughest state bills

on neutrality. Joining us, we have President of Tech Freedom, Baron Zoka, and former legal

fellow and now director of legal and regulatory policy at National Association of Manufacturers,

Graham Owens. Guys, thank you for joining the show. Thanks so much for having me.

So, Baron, do you want to give us a brief overview of what exactly this all is?

Not really, but I will anyway, and I'm sure no one wants to hear it.

So, as you know, we've been debating net neutrality for the last 15 years.

Congress has made a few attempts to pass legislation.

The last attempt in 2015 didn't go anywhere,

Republicans offered a bill. Democrats wouldn't come to the table. So the FCC has tried

several times to do its own thing. So in 2015, the FCC issued its open internet order. In

2017, the Republican FCC reversed that order. It said that the FCC had misclassified

broadband and that broadband is not a Title II common carrier service, as the FCC had said it was in

2015, but rather the Title I, lightly regulated information service that the FCC had said it was

from the beginning back in the late 90s on through

2015. And that's where we are today. The FCC therefore repealed most of the net neutrality

rules. Importantly, for our discussion today, they did not repeal all of them. They left in

place the transparency rule. So the federal approach to net neutrality today is that the

FCC requires transparency from broadband providers using its Title I jurisdiction and the

rest of the enforcement of how net neutrality is dealt with, how corporate promises are dealt with,

but also marketing claims, like that you offer unlimited data.

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