Report finds that 26 states now either restrict or outright prohibit towns and cities from building their own broadband networks, up from 20 in 2018
Many of the laws restricting local voters' rights were directly written by a telecom sector terrified of real broadband competition.
Context & Ripple Effects
Municipal broadband has run into state-level walls for a decade. In early 2015, President Obama called for repealing 19 state laws restricting cities' right to build their own networks, and weeks later the FCC moved to preempt the Tennessee and North Carolina statutes under its authority to overrule state barriers to municipal broadband.
First-order effects
- Six more states joined the restriction list in a single year, meaning local voters in most of the country can no longer approve community-owned networks even where incumbent service is poor.
Second-order effects
- The restrictions protect incumbents from exactly the competitor base that already exists — more than 750 communities run some form of community-owned network, so every new law forecloses proven models rather than experiments.
Third-order effects
- The pattern culminated in telecom lobbying shaping federal broadband subsidy rules so public money flows to large carriers instead of new municipal entrants, entrenching an industry structure in which the states themselves are the moat.
The trend: State legislatures, lobbied by telecom incumbents, are steadily converting municipal broadband from a local option into a prohibited one, deciding who may compete for public infrastructure funding before federal money arrives.