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
which often provides a radically better product & forces AT&T, Verizon, etc to actually compete on quality & price— is to preserve the monopolies of the telecoms paying ALEC & state legislators for the favor http://twitter.com/... Karl Bode / @karlbode : 26 states now have some type of ISP written law that bans or restricts your town or city from building their own broadband networks. And the organization (ALEC) that helped them do it was just given an appointment to the FCC's “consumer” advisory board. http://motherboard.vice.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The fight over municipal broadband has run through Washington before: in 2015 President Obama called for repealing 19 state restriction laws and the FCC moved to overrule state laws blocking city-built networks in Tennessee and North Carolina. Four years later the count has moved the other way — 26 states now restrict or prohibit municipal networks, up from 20 in 2018 — while an estimated 750+ communities already operate some form of community-owned broadband.
What makes this report pointed is the governance angle: ALEC, the organization accused of carrying ISP-written preemption bills into state legislatures, was just appointed to the FCC's consumer advisory board — placing a telecom-aligned group inside the agency that once tried to preempt those very laws.
First-order effects
- Towns and cities in the six states added since 2018 lose the legal option to build their own networks, capping the community-broadband model at its existing footprint.
- ALEC's seat on the FCC's consumer advisory board gives the group drafting state preemption laws a formal channel into federal broadband policy.
Second-order effects
- AT&T, Verizon and other incumbent ISPs face less price-and-quality pressure in restricted states, since the municipal competitors Motherboard describes as forcing them to compete are legally barred from forming.
- The state-law strategy proved durable enough that when federal money arrived later, Big Telecom's lobbying steered much of Biden's $41.6B broadband funding toward large companies rather than new municipal entrants (per The Verge's 2023 reporting).
Third-order effects
- State legislative preemption of local network-building is consolidating into the industry's standard defensive playbook — cheaper and more durable than fighting each municipal referendum — narrowing broadband competition to whatever incumbents choose to offer.
- If the pattern holds, community-owned networks keep growing mainly through cooperatives and existing operators rather than new city builds, entrenching a two-tier map of connected markets.
The trend: ISP-backed state preemption laws are steadily closing off municipal broadband as a competitive path, reversing the FCC's 2015 pro-city intervention and shaping who gets federal broadband money.