The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union is lobbying state governments to regulate Internet service providers as utilities. The CWA, which represents more than 150,000 workers at AT&T and over 30,000 at Verizon, announced on Monday a “multi-state effort to pass state legislation that would establish public utility commission oversight of broadband in public safety, network resiliency and consumer protection.”

“Legislation has already been introduced in California, Colorado and New York, and CWA is in active conversations with policymakers in state houses across the country about its model bill, the Broadband Resiliency, Public Safety and Quality Act,” the union said. In addition to broadband regulation, the model bill calls for regulation of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) home phone services offered by cable companies and other ISPs, which have replaced the old copper-wire landlines for many consumers.

“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—it’s codified in the Communications Act of 1934,” Gigi Sohn, a consumer advocate who served as counselor to then-Chairman Tom Wheeler in the Obama-era FCC, said in the CWA press release. “Unfortunately, many states abdicated that responsibility in the early part of the millennium at the behest of incumbent broadband providers. Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear that broadband is essential infrastructure, it’s time for states to take back that authority. I wholeheartedly support CWA’s initiative to convince states to reassert their authority over broadband and Voice over IP services.”

States should be “able to protect consumers, ensure that networks can withstand ever-increasing natural disasters and other threats to public safety, and collect data about broadband pricing, deployment, adoption and network resiliency,” Sohn said.

More at Ars Technica.