Abundant Home Broadband for All Californians: A Pathway to Digital Prosperity

California faces a persistent digital divide with approximately 15% of residents lacking broadband access. This contrasts sharply with essential utilities like electricity and water, highlighting how broadband is treated as a luxury rather than a necessity. Incumbent telecommunication companies maintain artificial scarcity by avoiding infrastructure investment in less profitable areas while blocking competitors. This creates a political dynamic of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits, wherein millions bear the costs of inadequate access while incumbent companies reap profits and deploy significant lobbying resources to oppose reform. Unlike other policy areas, broadband abundance requires no technological breakthroughs or significant societal tradeoffs, and the cost to do so is comparatively cheap. Achieving true abundance requires completion of the regulatory transition to treat broadband as a public utility and establishment of universal service obligations, rate regulation for affordability, reliability standards, and non-discriminatory access to directly address market failures that create digital scarcity. California has begun this process through Senate Bill 156, the largest state broadband investment in US history, which funds the creation of a state-owned middle-mile network, provides $2 billion for last-mile connectivity, and allocates an additional $750 million to support municipal broadband cooperatives