Update October 15, 2014: Only hours before a scheduled vote to authorize the California Public Utilities Commission to weigh in on the federal network neutrality debate and share the overwhelming opinions of Californians that the Internet should be re-classified as a public utility, the item was suddenly withdrawn from Thursday’s meeting agenda for undisclosed reasons.
The agency’s five commissioners had received over 3,000 individual emails from Californians appealing to them to help save the Internet and the Courage Campaign had scheduled the delivery of an additional 11,000 petition signatures to the Commission’s San Francisco headquarters in advance of tomorrow’s meeting. The federal network neutrality rulemaking collected 3.7 million comments, the most in history on any matter the agency has ever considered, and knocked the FCC’s servers off-line from the volume.
The vote on the authorization motion had originally been scheduled for October 2nd, but was postponed for two weeks after one of the commissioners suddenly changed their affirmative vote in the middle of a meeting after briefly leaving the room, possibly to take a phone call. Net neutrality supporters took advantage of the delay by contacting the Commissioners to express their strong support for a neutral Internet, which can only be achieved by strong anti-discrimination rules. The FCC, however, was told in Verizon vs FCC that it was unable to impose anti-discrimination rules (and stop Internet blocking) unless it reclassified broadband Internet access as a Title 2 telecommunications service, i.e., as a common carrier utility service.”
The mysterious withdrawal comes as the embattled agency is facing a federal prosecution for corruption after it was revealed Pacific Gas and Electric received help from Commission staff in “judge-shopping” for hearings related to the disastrous explosion that leveled a portion of the pensinsula suburb of San Bruno, CA. PUC Chair Michael Peevey has stated he will not seek reappointment from the CA governor due to the scandal.