Judge Denies T-Mobile Injunction to Block CPUC Per-Line USF Surcharge

A federal magistrate judge late Friday denied the motion of T-Mobile and its subsidiaries for a preliminary injunction that would have blocked the California Public Utilities Commission's change to a $1.11 monthly per-line USF contribution fee from the previous revenue-based mechanism. The order came a short time before CPUC’s mechanism change took effect Saturday in the state.

T-Mobile and its subsidiaries haven’t shown that the CPUC “exceeded its intrastate role” by imposing the flat-rate surcharge or that it shifted the USF funding burden against them in favor of LECs, said the order (docket 3:23-cv-00483) signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Lauren Beeler for Northern California in San Francisco. She denied the injunction, she said, because the T-Mobile subsidiaries failed to show a likelihood of success on the merits and because of the “serious questions going to the merits” of their claim that the CPUC per-line surcharge was preempted by federal law.