With a country fed up with the rising cost of living demanding that all political leaders focus relentlessly on meaningful affordability issues, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, you would think every elected Democrat would’ve gotten the memo by now, even as Donald Trump admits that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
Yet in California, a go-for-the-jugular attack on the state regulatory agency that has made the Golden State a national leader in addressing the affordability crisis at the heart of the digital divide is being led by *checks notes* a Democratic state lawmaker.
California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, a Democrat from Encinitas, is trying to fast-track legislation she authored known as Assembly Constitutional Amendment 9. It aims to strip telecommunications oversight authority away from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and shift it to a more easily lobbied state legislature and a hypothetical state broadband office that doesn’t yet exist.
On May 18, the under-the-radar bill passed in the Assembly in a 67-1 vote. It’s now heading to the state Senate, where it needs a two-thirds majority to get on a statewide ballot for California voters to ultimately decide.
The proposed legislation would remove the state’s existing constitutional requirement to define and regulate telecommunications as a public utility, which just happens to be the very deregulation that telecom monopolies operating in the state have been lusting after for years. Never mind that internet service now functionally operates as a utility akin to water and electricity—a basic requirement to meaningfully participate in modern society.
What could explain the effort is that Boerner has been the recipient of significant campaign contributions from the very telecom industry that stands to benefit most from her bill.
Boerner recently spoke on the Assembly floor, claiming that the CPUC needs to drop telecom regulation from its set of responsibilities so it can better focus on the rising cost of electricity in California. “We know that the CPUC has too much on their plate, and we want them to be able to do the work that they are tasked with, especially ratemaking, something that impacts all of our constituents’ everyday lives,” Boerner said.
When the Prospect reached out to her office to ask why she filed the bill, Boerner insisted in an emailed statement that the proposed legislation doesn’t completely “strip away the authority of the CPUC to regulate telephone corporations or any other utility” and that “any changes to the CPUC’s existing regulatory jurisdiction, process, and structure will require subsequent legislation.” Still, she said, “this ACA is a necessary step to give the Governor and Legislature the flexibility to have a comprehensive conversation about future reform.”
Given what the CPUC has done over the past several years to ensure that every family in California can afford internet access, Boerner’s characterization of her poison pill is enough to make Orwell blush and MAGA operatives smile.
The CPUC’s Role in Broadband Affordability
To understand what’s really at stake in Boerner’s proposal, it helps to understand what the CPUC has built, mostly behind the scenes, and what would be lost.
On telecom issues, the CPUC is not just a passive regulator. In the words of Ernesto Falcon, branch manager of the Communications and Broadband Policy division of the agency’s Public Advocates Office, the CPUC is something closer to “a public defender in the regulatory space.”
The office employs 22 public servants—attorneys, researchers, and policy specialists—whose sole job is to advocate for California consumers in a regulatory arena dominated by monopoly telecom companies with virtually unlimited resources to influence lawmakers and set the agenda.
It has built real institutional muscle that has produced real results. When the federal Affordable Connectivity Program expired in mid-2024, leaving millions of low-income Californians without the $30-per-month broadband subsidy they depended on to afford internet access, the CPUC recognized it couldn’t expect a solution from D.C.
The agency modified its existing LifeLine program—which had previously subsidized only voice telephone service—to launch a pilot program offering $20 monthly subsidies for internet service and $30 for bundled internet and voice service. But unlike the federal ACP, the California program established minimum quality standards, ensuring that internet service providers (ISPs) couldn’t just hoover up subsidies while offering crappy connectivity.
“We really wanted to make sure a carrier was providing a quality service,” Falcon recently explained in an in-depth conversation about the inner workings of the CPUC. “A number of them [telecom giants] complained about it because they wanted to offer inferior services and take the money. And we just said no.”
The program is funded through a small surcharge (between 75 cents and a dollar per month) assessed on every access line in California. With roughly 55 million access lines in the state, even a nominal fee generates enormous capacity to help people. And the returns, Falcon argues, far exceed the investment.
Using the methodology of a study by the Brattle Group, the CPUC’s own researchers found that broadband access produces significant savings in Medicaid costs and hospital visits alone.
“If you’re putting out $20 a month and you’re saving a hospital well past $20 a month in terms of reducing visits,” Falcon said, “it kind of pays for itself.”
The CPUC has also leveraged its merger review authority to extract meaningful consumer protections that would never come from a legislature steeped in telecom lobbying.
In its review of the proposed Charter Spectrum-Cox merger, which would combine the second- and fourth-largest cable companies in the state, the Public Advocates Office negotiated a settlement that requires Charter to offer a $20-per-month broadband tier to low-income subscribers for five years, with a 500 megabits-per-second (Mbps) base service tier at a price of $50 per month. It can be used in combination with the state’s LifeLine subsidy, reducing the out-of-pocket cost for eligible subscribers to just $20 per month.
The agency also secured a first-of-its-kind pricing condition that stipulates Charter’s promotional rates cannot vary by more than $15 between the most competitive and least competitive parts of the state. The provision was a direct response to data showing that the company had been quietly charging higher prices in neighborhoods with lower incomes and fewer ISP options.
“If it’s the same service, it should effectively be the same price,” Falcon said. “There should not be a world where a gigabit in one part of L.A. is more expensive than a gigabit in a different part of L.A. It’s the exact same damn wire.”
The CPUC has also used its utility pole oversight authority to reduce deployment costs for new market entrants, funded community organizations like Digital Equity LA to participate in the regulatory process, and partnered with UC Santa Barbara to develop data tools that can detect discriminatory pricing patterns at scale across the state.
And there’s more. The agency also administers a Loan Loss Reserve Fund—the only one of its kind in the nation—that provides low-cost financing exclusively to municipalities, cooperatives, tribes, school districts, and libraries that are looking to build their own internet networks.
None of this would survive what Boerner is proposing. If you strip the CPUC of its constitutional telecommunications authority, you strip away the legal foundation upon which every one of these interventions rests.
The same legislative body that passed her bill with barely a murmur of public debate would be handed jurisdiction over an industry that spends lavishly to lobby lawmakers in Sacramento. A hypothetical broadband office that doesn’t exist would inherit the mandate without any of the institutional knowledge, data infrastructure, legal authority, or independence to use it.
As Falcon noted, every advanced economy that many Americans, especially Democratic voters, look at with envy when it comes to internet connectivity, such as South Korea, Germany, and the Nordic countries, achieved ubiquitous internet access with an active, and expert, regulatory regime. “There is no country that had no regulatory involvement and … [because of that] incredible broadband options stemmed forth,” he said.
Other Blue States Got the (Affordability) Memo
Still smarting from when Boerner killed a broadband affordability bill filed last year—which she now says “remains an active bill [that] could be set for hearing, amended, or formally withdrawn”—digital equity groups in California are now gearing up to push back on the assemblywoman’s new effort to gut CPUC telecom authority.
S. Derek Turner, research director at the consumer group Free Press, was stunned by the move. “The 67-1 vote here is shocking,” he says. “I can’t speak to their other functions, but with telecom the CPUC has a strong reputation for not being a captured industry rubber stamp like other state PUCs, which should be a point of pride for our elected representatives.”
In contrast, Democratic leaders in other states have been addressing broadband affordability. New York has its Affordable Broadband Act in place, requiring large ISPs in New York to offer low-cost internet service for $15 a month to income-eligible households. Moreover, New York has received its federal broadband funds, which completely undercuts Boerner’s claim that her withdrawal of California’s broadband affordability bill last year was necessary to avoid California’s federal broadband funds being withheld.
In New Mexico, state Sen. Michael Padilla, a Democrat, spearheaded legislation that was passed into law earlier this year by updating the state’s Rural Telecommunications Act and empowering the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission to offer up to $30 per month for qualified households to pay for internet service.
On the day the bill was signed into law, Padilla said the new law made sense because “we know that brings economic development and job creation,” adding how “some communities have never had a health care professional, ever, in their communities. This is going to bring telehealth and telemedicine to those communities.”
In Maryland, Democratic state delegate Kris Fair filed legislation in his state that, if passed, would require ISPs operating in Maryland to offer low-cost internet service plans to eligible low-income households.
When that bill was filed, Fair’s chief of staff, Camila Reynolds-Dominguez, said that “Delegate Fair recognizes [high-speed Internet connectivity as] similar to things like water and power. It’s a utility because it’s essential for everyday life. It’s also part of a larger conversation on affordability. If we can do our part to lower the cost of essential services like internet , it won’t fix the whole problem, but it will help. It’s the states’ responsibility to step up and try to do something.”
In Illinois, state Sen. Rachel Ventura (D-Joliet) recently introduced a bill proposing to amend the state’s Utilities Act to require that large private telecoms in the state provide affordable, fast broadband access to low-income state residents.
“Investments in broadband are essential for all Illinoisans, regardless of whether they live in a rural, suburban or urban community,” Ventura said. “We’ve entered a new age where broadband is no longer a luxury, but an essential amenity, driving economic activity, improving education, expanding health care access and enhancing public services for all.”
The contrast with California is striking. While Democratic lawmakers across the country are working to strengthen broadband oversight and expand affordability protections, Boerner is sprinting in the opposite direction. It’s a John Fetterman-esque move that is, at minimum, a tone-deaf misreading of the political moment.
This is, after all, a state whose governor and potential presidential candidate Gavin Newsom is actively pushing back against the right-wing narrative that California’s affordability crisis is driving people out. At worst, Boerner’s bill is a gift to the telecom monopolies that have spent decades and untold millions trying to achieve exactly what she’s offering them for free.
California has built something rare: a functioning, consumer-oriented regulatory agency that is making a real difference. Boerner’s bill would hand the keys to the very people who have spent decades trying to get inside the CPUC to dismantle any semblance of oversight in an effort to protect the monopolies no one loves.
