The Municipal Broadband Battle

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act made it clear that Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants should be made available to everybody—commercial entities, non-profit entities, Tribes, and municipal entities. But there will be an eventual showdown since many states have barriers or restrictions against municipal participation in building, owning, or operating commercial broadband networks. If there is any one area where politics creep into building broadband, it is with state restrictions on municipalities. There are states, like North Carolina, where the legislature has repeatedly emphasized that it doesn’t want municipalities to be funding or operating fiber networks. This is also a bigger political issue because it creates another skirmish point in the ongoing battle over state rights versus federal mandates. There are many states that have drawn hard lines against federal mandates, even when it costs them a lot of money.