The Broadband Boost Small-Town America Needs

[Op-ed] Publicly owned broadband networks exist for one purpose: to give the most people the best service at the lowest possible prices. They do this because they know it benefits their residents’ quality of life and incomes. Verizon, Comcast and other big internet providers don’t like localities encroaching on their business, and they have gone to court to stop public broadband networks from being established. They have lost these cases, but defending them costs governments time and money. More successfully, the private companies have persuaded state legislatures to pass laws restricting municipalities from setting up community networks. I believe that the political climate is getting better. With the increasing attention given to internet access as an engine of economic development, it’s getting harder for a state legislator to argue with a straight face that it’s in the public interest to stop towns or smaller cities from providing it, particularly when the big private-sector companies have been so slow to wire them up. Most such laws were passed years ago, but today there are efforts to repeal or bypass them. While providing good internet service publicly has the whiff of socialism, at a local level such efforts don’t divide neatly into red-blue political categories. Plenty of publicly owned broadband networks are located in Republican-leaning states and counties. Good internet service can cut through ideological lines.

[Alex Marshall is a Senior Fellow at The Regional Plan Association in New York City]