This week, California filed its first brief in the lawsuit by the United States and Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast that seeks to overturn California’s net neutrality law. SB 822, which was signed into law in September 2018, is the only state law that comprehensively restores all the net neutrality protections from the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order.

At issue is whether any state can protect its residents from misbehavior by the companies they pay to get online, and thanks to the United States’ and the ISPs’ sweeping arguments, even whether states can regulate any online services, including enacting online privacy laws.

Net neutrality is the principle that companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon that connect us to the Internet cannot interfere with what we do online. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) protected that principle for decades until the Trump administration’s FCC, led by Chairman Pai, repealed all meaningful net neutrality protections in 2018 and said that the FCC didn’t have authority to enact net neutrality, even if it wanted to.

In response, California adopted its own net neutrality law, SB 822. The law, championed by California State Senator Scott Wiener, went into effect on January 1, 2019. As the only state-level law that truly restores all of the 2015 net neutrality protections, it is widely viewed as a model law.

Read full blog post here.