Good afternoon, everybody.  Thank you to CWA for inviting me to speak today.

I wholeheartedly support CWA’s initiative to restore states’ authority over broadband and Voice over IP services. States have always had a vital role to play in overseeing our communications networks and ensuring that those networks are operated in the public interest. In fact, the Communications Act of 1934 expressly recognizes this. Yet nearly half of the states in the US abdicated that responsibility in the early part of the millennium at the behest of incumbent broadband providers. Their argument? That robust competition and oversight by the federal government will protect consumers.

As we know now, the federal government hasn’t protected consumers and if anything, the broadband market has become less competitive. In 2017 the Trump FCC abdicated its responsibility to protect consumers and promote competition in the broadband market when it reclassified broadband as an unregulated information service. This left California firefighters without recourse when Verizon throttled its service during the Mendocino complex fire in 2018. It left mobile phone users at risk when carriers sold their personal data to data brokers who then sold it to bounty hunters. And it left consumers unprotected when the COVID-19 pandemic left many in the US unable to pay their broadband bills or forced them to pay overage charges to work, see a doctor, schedule a vaccine or allow their children to attend school online.

The pandemic made clear to everyone what many of us have known for some time – broadband is essential infrastructure that is necessary to participate in our society, our economy and our culture. Yet tens of millions of Americans don’t have broadband, either because it’s too costly or because there’s no network available to them or the available network is wholly inadequate. States have been on the front lines of trying to close this digital divide. According to the National Governors’ Association, 36 governors to date have highlighted broadband infrastructure as critical to closing equity gaps and for responding to both the coronavirus pandemic and the associated economic crisis.

But states can only do so much in the absence of legal authority over broadband and Voice over IP services. In addition to ensuring that their residents are connected, states must be able to protect consumers from, among other things, fraudulent billing, price gouging, discriminatory network management and privacy violations. And they must be able to ensure that networks are resilient and can stand up to the increasing number of natural disasters and other threats to public safety. This should be the case whether or not the FCC reinstates its authority over broadband. CWA’s legislative plan restores states’ proper place as stewards of their residents’ right to have robust, resilient and affordable access to the most important communications network of our lifetimes.

Thank you.