The Republican Attack on California

Recently, California passed its own network neutrality laws, to ban blocking and throttling of the internet, as a stand-in for the federal net neutrality rules abandoned by the Trump administration in June. California has obvious reasons to want to protect an open internet: It is the land of the internet’s origin, and a place where tech entrepreneurship has thrived. If the Republican Party actually believed in economic decentralization, it might well accept the premise of state rules where the federal government explicitly disclaims any authority to act. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a self-declared states’ rights champion, declared within hours of the law’s passage that the Department of Justice will sue California for infringing corporate prerogatives — that is, interfering with the right of cable and phone companies to block or slow internet content. This attack on state net neutrality is no outlier but one of a series of similar invasions of states’ rights undertaken in the name of corporate sovereignty, which, in the age of a new nationalism, has been elevated above state law.

[Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia]