Sacramento’s unworkable Internet plan

Alot of roads are paved with good intentions, but they usually don’t end up anywhere good.

That’s definitely true of Sacramento’s go-it-alone plan on net neutrality by passing legislation to regulate the Internet just in California. A vital, open Internet where everyone can participate and no company can discriminate, censor or manipulate our data is the right goal — but this is the wrong way to get there.

I have worked for years to protect and expand the public’s access to the airwaves and to give the unheard a voice. I run Crossings TV, an Asian language network dedicated to providing an outlet for growing but underserved communities in our state.

But this commitment has deeper roots, from my childhood growing up as an African American in the ’50s, when a person of color on TV was as unheard of as a Republican-controlled California Legislature is today. And I continued working on these issues in the Carter White House, where we created the Minority Tax Certificate, which tripled the number of minority-owned broadcast and cable TV outlets, and at the FCC, where we planted the first seeds of the breakup of AT&T to give Americans more choice in their communications.

From these experiences, I can see that the California net neutrality plan will fail because it will be struck down in the courts. Even the most active champions of net neutrality recognize this, like the legal counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who wrote: “The legislators sadly chose an approach that is vulnerable to legal attack.” This is because the federal government has already “preempted” state efforts to directly regulate the Internet.

But even if the California bill could survive, the true test is in the marketplace. Again and again, well-meaning bills like this one nevertheless spin off unintended consequences that are selfdefeating in terms of higher costs and/or lower innovation.

There is only one Internet — a seamless, organic, interconnected whole that respects no state boundaries and requires one consistent set of technical and legal standards to operate. California cannot stop emails at the border and scan them for compliance with the whims of Sacramento. And privacy protection is only as good as its weakest link — so no matter how strong the go-it-alone rules we enact in our state may be, they’ll mean nothing if Nevada or some other state adopts a Wild West approach and leaks our information when it passes through that state.

Internet businesses cannot comply with 50 different versions of “net neutrality.” The result will be higher costs for consumers, slower innovation of our networks, and an inward-looking Internet that worries more about navigating red tape than connecting and empowering our people.

Even worse — these rules will only empower the nearmonopoly platforms that already dominate a space that has too little competition. Small upstarts can’t afford the legal and compliance teams needed to survive that kind of regulatory obstacle, but Facebook and Google can.

Or at least they could if the proposed rules even applied to them. And that’s the biggest gap of all in California’s legislation — the rules completely exempt the Big Tech platforms that are responsible for so much abuse and anticompetitive behavior online.

Everyone now understands that these platforms must be reined in. Yet the California rules give these platforms a hall pass and then further distort the market by imposing inconsistent regulation on their competitors only.

We need one set of comprehensive rules for the entire Internet. But that’s a job for Congress, not for Sacramento.