Municipal Networks

The Trump administration’s recent decision to kill the Open Internet Order has a lot of network neutrality advocates fearing the worst.  Although it remains to be seen whether that will happen, a small but growing number of users are taking matters into their own hands by exploring community- or municipal-owned, operated and funded internet access as a cheaper, faster and more neutral alternative to using large commercial internet service providers.

Today I want to discuss Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai’s belief that we are on the cusp of a new era of partnership between the FCC and rural electric cooperatives. Specifically: our hope that electric coops will become a bigger part of closing the digital divide and delivering online opportunity to rural Americans who have been bypassed by the broadband revolution. And how the FCC can work with you all to bring about this change. 

Municipal broadband seems like the savior of the open internet. Except the challenges its rollout face are so legion that I am deeply unconvinced muni broadband is the solution to the repeal of net neutrality.

The city council in Fort Collins (CO) on Jan 2 voted to move ahead with a municipal fiber broadband network providing gigabit speeds, two months after the cable industry failed to stop the project. The city council vote came after residents of Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build a broadband network. The ballot question, passed in November, didn't guarantee that the network would be built because city council approval was still required, but that hurdle is now cleared.

When Chad Pierce and his family bought a new house this year, they made sure of one thing: that getting Internet service wouldn't be a problem. But, Internet service wasn't readily available—and Charter wouldn't extend its network to the house unless the Pierce family paid $16,000 to cover most of the company's construction costs. The house is about 550 feet from the road, Pierce said. "Needless to say, we were pretty devastated," Pierce said.

[Commentary] The only sure fire strategy to regain control of this vital underpinning of modern economies is for us to own the broadband networks themselves. Only then will we able make the rules that serve the public interest. Decisions about caps and rates and access, about the digital divide and net neutrality and privacy can and should be debated and made at the local level, not in some distant boardroom or in even more distant federal agencies and federal courts.

When the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal net neutrality regulations, it went one step further: It banned state and local governments from taking their own action to preserve net neutrality within their borders. It’s a preemption effort that isn’t sitting well with local leaders across the country. Already, states and local governments say they’re preparing to sue the FCC. This could be an uphill battle: The FCC has authority over interstate communication laws, and Republican commissioners cite the Constitution's Commerce Clause to support their case.

The fight for municipal broadband has been a quiet drama unfolding across dozens of cities nationwide in recent years. In addition to Colorado, around 20 states have legislation on the books curtailing the construction of city-owned broadband networks, which threaten the dominance of corporate Internet service providers. But a growing number of communities like Fort Collins (CO) are pushing back against these laws. Their attempts could take on added urgency because of efforts at the federal level to rework how the internet is governed.

The Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality move gives fresh air to the arguments from municipal broadband proponents that city-run systems are the best way to ensure an affordable and free internet. Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has studied the systems that have popped up all over the country. He said that these systems have far greater incentive to maintain net neutrality and that local control has some benefits people may not immediately consider.

[Commentary] The internet, the mega-utility of the 21st century, officially has no regulator. In the meantime, fed up with federal apathy and sick of being held back by lousy internet access controlled by local cable monopolies, scrappy cities around the US are working hard to find ways to get cheap, world-class fiber-optic connectivity. But now there’s an additional obstacle: Powerful right-wing billionaires have joined the fight against municipal fiber efforts, using their deep pockets to fund efforts to block even the most commonsense of plans.