Minnesota Kills Ignorant Ban On Community Broadband Bought By The Telecom Lobby
Minnesota is the latest state to eliminate a pointless state ban on community owned and operated broadband networks ghost written by the telecom lobby.
New legislation, just signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz, eliminates two statutes that sought to protect large monopoly telecommunications providers from community-based competition. Minnesota is one of 17 (now 16) states that buckled to lobbying (usually by AT&T or Comcast) to effectively ban community owned and operated broadband networks, even if voters approve of them.
Sometimes the state laws are an outright ban. Other times, like in Minnesota’s case, the law prohibits municipalities from building such networks if a giant regional monopoly already serves (or pretends to serve via misleading maps) a location, or might someday decide to do so in the future. They’re usually written to let telecoms bog communities down in perpetual bureaucracy.
Popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn, who you’ll recall was blocked from a Senate FCC nomination thanks to a sleazy telecom industry smear campaign, had this to say about Minnesota’s decision:
“This is a significant win for the people of Minnesota and highlights a positive trend—states are dropping misguided barriers to deploying public broadband as examples of successful community-owned networks proliferate across the country.”
Just a few years ago, there were 21 such state barriers. But COVID lockdowns highlighted both the substandard and expensive nature of home broadband access, and the utter, counterproductive pointlessness of letting AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, or CenturyLink executives overrule local, voter-approved infrastructure decisions.
Angered by a generation of shitty, monopolized broadband access, almost 500 communities have now built some kind of municipal broadband network. These networks take on a variety of forms including direct government builds, cooperatives, extensions of the city-owned power utility, or public-private partnerships. Many will be aided by the looming $42.5 billion in infrastructure bill broadband funds.
Telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast could have nipped this movement in the bud by building better, faster, cheaper, broadband networks. But being predatory monopolies, they found it cheaper and more efficient to lobby corrupt lawmakers into state and federal bans, and to fund fake consumer groups to lie to locals about how such efforts are a socialist “government takeover of the internet.”
The problem for telecom giants is that disdain for shitty cable, phone, and broadband monopolies is a bipartisan sport built on decades of subscriber mistreatment. Community networks generally have broad, bipartisan support, especially once locals are able to purchase symmetrical gigabit fiber service for $60-$70 a month with no caps, contracts, or annoying predatory fees.
Big telecom (and the think tankers, consultants, and lobbyists paid to love them) adore pretending that they oppose community broadband simply because they’re worried about the impact on taxpayers (many muni builds utilize zero taxpayer money).
They’re hopeful you don’t remember or realize that these same giant companies have hoovered up untold billions in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks, merger approvals, and regulatory favors in exchange for the shitty, sluggish, spotty and expensive most Americans “enjoy” today.
The U.S. telecom market failed due to mindless consolidation, monopolization, and years of corruption and regulatory failure. Community broadband is the organic, grass roots response.
So despite protests by industry, this isn’t a trend that’s slowing down anytime soon, and it seems very likely that the number of state bans on community broadband will only continue to shrink.