The California Assembly passed the state’s VoIP deregulation bill 63-12...

as Assemblymember Joan Buchanan (D) said, “Internet technology” and as Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D) said, the question of who regulates the Internet. At prior hearings (CD Aug 10 p9), some opponents disputed the idea that the Internet played any real role in what the VoIP industry will become and insisted VoIP technology would look and functionally be indistinguishable from a phone. Only one assembly member spoke in opposition Monday. “Not even I have enough lipstick to make [this bill] pretty,” said Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D), who expressed concerns about what the bill would do to people with disabilities, the poor and the elderly as well as its implications for free expression. “The Legislature needs to vote down SB1161, and it needs to do so quickly,” an Aug. 18 San Francisco Chronicle editorial said (http://xrl.us/bnmoky). PUC commissioner remarks on SB-1161 “suggest their views are rooted in a 1960s understanding of technology -- not a 21st century global Internet,” wrote SF New Tech Founder Myles Weissleder in a Monday San Francisco Chronicle op-ed in defense of the bill (http://xrl.us/bnmn2j). He described the tech community’s embrace of SB-1161. Opposition emanates from focusing on “the red herring of what the bill doesn’t do [rather] than what it will do,” he said. He insisted the bill would preserve all PUC authority over traditional telecom. Weissleder, in phrasing akin to that used by the bill’s advocates, praised SB-1161’s regulatory “certainty to the evolving, highly competitive Internet economy.” Now the bill will advance to the Senate, which has already approved the bill but needs to vote on the amended version. If passed there, it will move to Gov. Jerry Brown’s office and if signed there, become California law. Regina Costa, telecom director of The Utility Reform Network (TURN), told us the bill is “not a done deal” and proposed “the governor may be hesitant given the opposition of his own CPUC appointees.”