Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the Ninth Circuit has rejected a challenge to California's Netflix Corporate Welfare and Internet Censorship Act of 2018.
The question under consideration seems to be:
If the FCC won't ensure that my next door neighbor (whose monthly bandwidth use probably runs in the megabytes, not gigabytes) is forced to subsidize my HD streaming habit and empower itself to determine which content is "lawful" and therefore must be subsidized, can the states do it on their own?
It seems to me that there's another consideration here -- a constitutional provision that gets abused a lot, but that seems applicable: The Interstate Commerce Clause.
Almost all of the bits flowing up and down lines to California users are probably crossing state lines while doing so.
The Interstate Commerce Clause says Congress, not the state of California, gets to regulate that kind of thing. And no, that power doesn't magically devolve to the states just because Congress (or federal agencies acting under congressional mandates) choose not to exercise it in this or that particular way. If Florida's legislature bans, puts extra taxes on, etc. commerce in grapes from New York, the courts will put a stop to that post-haste. Why would bits on wires be any different?
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