Municipal Broadband Projects Limited by Bad Laws and Corruption, Panelists Say
Money in politics, corruption, misinformation, and legislation “with ominous titles” have all acted as barriers to effective municipal broadband, panelists said Tuesday at the Freedom to Connect conference in Silver Spring, Md. The result is limited speed and adoption, and higher prices, keeping the U.S. out of the top echelon of developed countries with ubiquitous and speedy broadband, they said.
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Harvard Professor Larry Lessig railed against state legislation that prevents local communities from offering municipal broadband services, in a dynamic presentation that elicited applause and laughter from a friendly audience. He cited North Carolina, which in one study ranked last in broadband speeds, prompting communities to build their own network architecture. “They were extremely successful,” Lessig said: Traditional broadband providers were providing asymmetrical, “slow and expensive” broadband; community providers were providing symmetrical and fast broadband.
The municipal success, Lessig said, in turn prompted a state law, H.129, aimed at preventing cities and towns from having an unfair advantage when they compete with the private telecom providers. “Is it unfair when the cities provide street lights or when they build highways?” Lessig asked. “These are not instances of unfairness.” Infrastructure -- including broadband connectivity -- requires the support of communities and governments. “Public support is essential,” he said, encouraging proponents of public support to frame the issues in a smarter way so that the answers strike people as obvious.
"North Carolina really shows the damage done by the Citizens United decision, and in particular the kind of unbridled power that has been released in this unholy marriage between right-wing millionaires and their big industry partners,” said Catharine Rice, president of the southeast chapter of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, referring to the Supreme Court decision on outside spending in elections. Rice, who worked with Wilson, N.C., in the development and implementation of the state’s first fiber-to-the home system, likened fiber networks to “the next generation of roads."
Rice described some “pretty troubling hearings,” in which the sponsor of H.129 said local governments shouldn’t be allowed to get involved in risky fiber projects “because wireless is going to make fiber obsolete in five years,” she said, to tittering from the audience, who clearly disagreed with that sentiment.
Nineteen states have barriers to municipalities building their own broadband networks, said Chris Mitchell, director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “They specifically have gone out of their way to make it harder” for municipalities to build broadband networks, even though such networks are often the fastest. “In the United States, if you're getting cutting edge services, you're probably getting it from a small provider or local government,” Mitchell said, citing Bristol, Va., Lafayette, La., and Chattanooga as municipalities that offer gigabit broadband services.
Speakers encouraged young people and computer geeks to contact their congressmen. Lessig encouraged people who otherwise hate politics to “devote a chunk of their cycles” to doing something about the issue. “Until we can get more energy from the geeks towards an issue they care about, linked to the corruption issue, we're not going to get any real progress,” he said.