In today's decision, we adopt another part of the previously proposed revisions to General Order (GO) 96-A, which comprehensively governs utility tariffs (including their content, form, and publication, and the advice letters by which they are amended).¹ The rules revisions adopted today (which will eventually be codified in GO 96-B) are set forth in the Appendix; they chiefly concern the authority we are delegating to our staff to suspend the effectiveness of an advice letter that might otherwise take effect by operation of law 30 days after filing. We also adopt certain requirements to facilitate advice letter review, such as use of the Internet for service of advice letters and related documents.

We intend to adopt and implement these rules revisions now, for advice letters filed on or after 90 days after the effective date of today's decision, and without waiting for adoption of GO 96-B as a whole. As with our prior interim opinions (see footnote 1), we believe adoption and implementation of these rules revisions will benefit consumers, and should not be delayed.²

¹ In prior interim opinions (Decision (D.) 01-07-026 and D.02-01-038) in this rulemaking, we adopted rules governing (1) use of the Internet to publish tariffs, (2) representations by a utility regarding any of that utility's tariffed services, and (3) notice that a telecommunications utility must provide affected customers when it proposes a rate increase, a withdrawal of service, or certain kinds of transfers. The intense review of advice letter procedures in this rulemaking also brought to light an unintended distinction between different types of local exchange carriers when entering into customer-specific contracts. By D.01-11-059, we modified the contract filing procedure established in D.94-09-065 so as to apply that procedure uniformly to all local exchange carriers. ² Until we take final action on GO 96-B, the requirements adopted today will be treated as an Appendix to GO 96-A, as we did with the rules adopted in D.01-07-026 and D.02-01-038. The various interim rules will be published at the Commission's Internet site together with the rest of GO 96-A. To the extent that a provision of GO 96-A is inconsistent with the interim rules, the interim rules prevail. For example, Rule 4.6 of today's decision supersedes those provisions in Parts IV and V of GO 96-A setting "regular notice" for most advice letters as 40 days between the filed and effective dates.