“Roughly 69 percent of California’s BEAD funding flows to five large, national providers: Comcast ($400 million), AT&T ($331 million), Verizon/Frontier ($173 million), Amazon’s Kuiper satellite service ($55 million), and SpaceX’s Starlink ($22 million),” Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick wrote today.

According to van Schewick, another casualty of the BEAD restriction would be a 2019 California law that prohibits mobile providers from throttling first responders during emergencies. The law was passed after Verizon throttled an “unlimited” data plan used by Santa Clara County firefighters during a wildfire.

“Those protections exist for a reason: left to their own devices, Internet providers have put profits over public safety before. California is now being asked to sign away those protections for fourteen years,” she wrote.

California would have a good case because the federal BEAD law says funded providers must follow state and local laws, van Schewick wrote. “A federal agency can’t use fine print in a grant to override what Congress wrote into the statute,” she wrote, adding that Newsom “should refuse to sign away California’s net neutrality, affordability, and public-safety protections and go to court to get the money the way Congress intended: with every state protection intact.”