Lobbying Against Municipal Broadband

Every few years since municipal broadband was new, a lobbying group comes out against the concept of municipal competition. The lobbying effort has taken many different tactics over the years, but generally the attacks against municipal broadband haven’t been very public and were aimed at generating lobbying materials to give to politicians. An anti-municipal lobbying effort using a new tactic recently surfaced. There is a huge lobbying effort underway against Utopia, a municipally-owned network in Utah. It seems to be the biggest dollar lobbying effort against municipal broadband by far, and local press reported that the anti-Utopia campaign has purchased something like a million dollars in ads in Salt Lake City to lobby against municipal broadband. This campaign puzzles me. Utopia operates an open-access network. This means that the fiber network is municipally-owned, but that broadband is provided by commercial service providers. The most puzzling aspect of the lobbying campaign is that somebody is spending a lot of money with no specific obvious goal. This seems like a lot of money to spend to make the generic point that municipal broadband is somehow a bad thing, particularly in Utah where Utopia is popular.