from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

I recently noted how California’s being told by the Trump administration that it can’t enforce any of its own telecom consumer protection laws if it wants to receive $1.4 billion dollars Congress already earmarked for broadband expansion under the 2021 infrastructure bill .

That means if California wants money it was already supposed to receive from Congress , it can’t enforce its own net neutrality law, telecom privacy law, affordability metrics, reliability targets, or effectively do anything telecom monopoly giants like AT&T and Comcast don’t like for the next 14 years .

More specifically, some extremely unpopular Trump NTIA revisions to the infrastructure bill’s Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program included a little something called “Condition 50,” which would impose a 14 year moratorium on telecom consumer protection in the state.…