California should regulate broadband internet providers like public utilities — imposing rate controls, universal access requirements, and reliability standards to ensure every resident has affordable, high-speed internet access, according to a new UC Riverside public policy report.

The recommendation comes from a position paper by Edward Helderop, associate director of UC Riverside’s Center for Geospatial Sciences. The report was published this week by the nonprofit state policy news outlet Cal Matters and UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab.

“Nowadays, broadband internet access is as important as something like electricity or water in an American household,” Helderop said.

Yet about 15% of California households lack broadband access — primarily in low-income urban neighborhoods and in rural and tribal communities – even though it is now essential for modern life.

“You’re ending up with households in California that are being essentially left behind as more and more of daily life moves to the internet,” Helderop said. “Households without it have fewer employment opportunities and fewer educational opportunities.”

The digital divide became starkly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, when students in low-income families struggled to attend online classes from home.

“There were these enduring images of somebody driving a car full of elementary school kids to a McDonald’s parking lot to use the Wi-Fi to do their homework in the car,” Helderop said. “And that, I think, caught a lot of policymakers by surprise.”

In urban areas, broadband is generally available, but affordability remains a barrier. Median monthly costs range from $70 to $80.

“Many households can’t afford it, or they decide that they would prioritize some other bill over home broadband,” Helderop said.

In many rural and tribal areas, however, broadband service is unavailable altogether because telecommunications companies see little financial incentive to build infrastructure in sparsely populated regions.

“Even if users want home broadband, even if they have the means to pay for it, they may simply not have the option,” Helderop said.

The report argues that California’s persistent digital divide stems less from technological limitations than from market failures and weak oversight of federal grant programs that have provided millions of dollars to telecom companies to expand access.

Helderop contends that broadband scarcity in California is largely artificial. Telecommunications companies, the report says, avoid investing in less profitable regions while using political influence to block competition and keep prices high. The result is markets with little price competition and limited consumer choice, he said.

California has begun addressing the problem through Senate Bill 156, signed by Gov. Newsom in 2021, described in the report as the largest state broadband investment in U.S. history. The $6 billion initiative funds the construction of a state-owned “middle-mile” fiber network that will serve as a backbone across the state. It also provides $2 billion for last-mile connections in communities and $750 million to support municipal broadband cooperatives.

In addition to utility-style regulation, Helderop recommends completing the state’s middle-mile network — projected to exceed 8,000 miles — to open markets to new providers to provide competition and reduce regional monopolies. The open-access backbone would allow smaller or community-based providers to compete without massive upfront infrastructure costs.

The report also calls for mandatory broadband data transparency. Providers would be required to publicly disclose actual end-user speeds (as opposed to advertised speeds), pricing tiers, reliability metrics, and service coverage areas. Such information would help consumers make informed choices and allow policymakers to better target subsidies and investments.

Finally, Helderop urges California to foster municipal broadband cooperatives that would connect directly to the state-owned backbone. Under that model, communities could keep telecommunications revenue local while ensuring accountability.

The report, titled “Abundant Home Broadband for All Californians: A Pathway to Digital Prosperity,” concludes that achieving “broadband abundance” requires recognizing that the current scarcity is not inevitable.

With the technology already available to connect every home and business, the remaining challenge, Helderop writes, is political will — and a regulatory framework that prioritizes universal service over profit.

The report was written as part of the Abundance Policy Report Series produced by the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab’s Abundance Accelerator.