Every few years since municipal broadband was new, a lobbying group comes out against the concept of municipal competition. The lobbying effort has taken many different tactics over the years, but generally the attacks against municipal broadband haven’t been very public and were aimed at generating lobbying materials to give to politicians.
For example, a common tactic has been for some mysterious group to pay a professor to criticize existing municipal broadband businesses. It was always assumed that these groups were funded by the big ISPs, but that was often just a guess. The documents generated usually contained some sliver of truth but were often also full of exaggerations and outright lies that were intended to prove that municipal broadband is a lousy economic model that can’t possibly succeed. These supposedly academic documents didn’t even get much press in the cities being attacked – but that was never the intent. These were intended for lobbying local, state, and federal politicians around the country against municipal broadband.
The other kind of lobbying against municipal broadband was more direct, and big ISPs have spent big money to try to block municipal broadband from coming to fruition. In many communities, the issue of launching a broadband network has been put to a public vote, and when that happens, big ISPs have spent some huge dollars to try to convince the public to vote against municipal broadband. Some of the anti-municipal broadband lobbying efforts succeeded, and some communities voted against the concept – and I’m sure ISPs believe this was money well spent. But a lot of communities have still voted to fund broadband.
Even when lobbying against a specific municipal election, the lobbying effort has always been unsavory, since the big ISPs rarely put their name on the lobbying effort. The lobbying is usually done in the name of some newly-minted non-profit entity with an altruistic-sounding name that was created just for the election. I think cable companies and telcos understand that they can’t openly lobby against competition. If there is one thing I’ve learned from twenty years of conducting surveys it’s that folks want to have a choice of ISP.
An anti-municipal lobbying effort using a new tactic recently surfaced. There is a huge lobbying effort underway against Utopia, a municipally-owned network in Utah. This effort seems to be the biggest dollar lobbying effort against municipal broadband by far, and local press reported that the anti-Utopia campaign has purchased something like a million dollars in ads in Salt Lake City to lobby against municipal broadband.
This campaign puzzles me. Utopia operates an open-access network. This means that the fiber network is municipally-owned, but that broadband is provided by commercial ISPs. The Utopia website currently lists fifteen different ISPs that sell broadband and other services on the fiber network. Customers on the Utopia network have more choice of ISPs than anywhere else in the nation.
The vehemence against Utopia puzzles me because the majority of the past lobbying against municipal broadband was aimed against municipal ISPs that competed directly by selling retail service. Almost universally, past lobbying has argued that municipalities shouldn’t compete against commercial companies but should instead form partnerships with ISPs. That is exactly what Utopia has done – it partners with fifteen commercial ISPs to bring broadband to homes and businesses. With fifteen partners, Utopia is clearly pro-commercial ISP.
I speculate that the lobbying is due to Utopia’s continued expansion. The company recently started construction in Bountiful, Utah, which is the twentieth city to join the Utopia fiber network. The process to get Bountiful to agree to join the network took many years but was ultimately approved in May by a 5-0 vote of the City Council. Utopia has been in discussions with other cities that are considering joining the fiber network.
An article by Broadband Breakfast says that Greg Hughes, the former speaker of the Utah House, is the public face of the anti-Utopia lobbying effort that goes under the name of NoGovInternet. I haven’t heard anyone who knows for sure the source of the underlying money for the ads, but a group called the Utah Taxpayers Association lobbied against the effort in Bountiful, and the folks in the City say that Comcast and Lumen have sponsored that group in the past.
The most puzzling aspect of the lobbying campaign is that somebody is spending a lot of money with no specific obvious goal. There are not a lot of other cities with an imminent vote to join Utopia. There is no noticeable opposition to Utopia in the cities where it operates. This seems like a lot of money to spend to make the generic point that municipal broadband is somehow a bad thing, particularly in Utah where Utopia is popular.
The folks at Utopia have responded in about the only way they can. They have pointed out that customers in their markets love the fast speeds from fiber and the choice of picking from multiple ISPs. Every town they operate in is happy with them. About all they can do is shrug in bewilderment about why they are being targeted.
It’s likely UTOPIA is the target of incumbent lobbying because it poses a threat to the vertically integrated business model of the legacy telcos and cablecos. The incumbents don’t want publicly owned delivery infrastructure model to succeed as a superior, lower cost alternative and are threatened by the growth of UTOPIA. Also, that UTOPIA exporting the model via advisory relationships with Yellowstone Fiber in Montana and California’s Golden State Connect Authority.
The same organization – The Domestic Policy Caucus – that funded the anti-Utopia effort has spun off another “project” named MassPriorities (but based in Minnesota) with a stupid but well-funded ad campaign against the Falmouth, Massachusetts town-wide fiber project. More on that one here
https://www.capenews.net/falmouth/news/national-public-broadband-group-takes-issue-with-mass-priorities-campaign/article_ae3af6b4-93cb-5b1b-82e7-acdfde6ce05f.html
here
https://www.capenews.net/falmouth/opinion/unanswered-questions—editorial/article_b6a4dc5a-af86-5b5e-a425-f3e2fc345bf1.html
and here
https://www.capenews.net/falmouth/opinion/local-networks-local-journalism-and-dark-money/article_2a9490f0-db91-5b54-b158-50f903bf760b.html
I would categorize anti-muni networks in 2 camps. The ‘government can’t do this right for long camp’ which I’m a member, and the ‘this breaks all our crony deals and upsets the monopolies’ camp which I suspect is where almost all of the lobby groups fall into.
For me, this just makes the government the local monopoly on delivery. Yes, open access networks can help a bit since the muni network is just transport to a provider in a datacenter or simiple, but in makes the entire network beholden to a federal or state funding hand out, or the city council’s budgetary whims. You get a couple new council members in and suddenly access fees go up dramatically or they lay off half the support crews and so on. At some point someone will see it as a revenue model and not a public service and suddenly the city council is basically the board of directors for the local ISP.
These are the same city councils that always seem to have a membor that thinks 5G will cause them to grow an extra limb… It’s also the group that is responsible for the nice roads in their own neighborhoods and the gravel roads and potholed roads elsewhere.
If you want your internet access to look a lot like the roads in your town, let a city council run it.
Good point that argues for a regional entity like UTOPIA.
It’s still city councils ‘at the helm’. Granted, the more cities involved the more resilient to a dramatic representative change, but it’s still the same issue. When citys’ coffers dry up they start cutting programs there’s no one to come in and fill that void. One city that suffers could bring the whole thing down because if they cut funding the other cities have to pick up the slack and costs.
With businesses, if one starts tripping up, others see opportunity and can move in.
Utopia is one of the only active muni internet services today in America and they’re pretty new, only existing during pretty decent economic times. Look to all the rest for exactly what happens when there’s a little economic pinch.
This regional model is less prone to individual municipal fiscal vicissitudes. UTOPIA is fully funded by end user fees and ISP leases, not member city budgets. The member munis however do pledge sales tax revenue as a backup source of bond debt service should there be insufficient operating revenue.
There is a lot of empirical evidence that this point – with some muni networks being more than 30 years old that while we may have concerns about what *may* happen, what actually happens almost always repeats what happened with electricity – it is run professionally.
I guess you’ve missed all the headlines of the fragility of the electrical grid, the skyrocketing outages, the entire regions that go down in storms and put people’s lives at risk, and the reluctance to even allow for things like solar roof hookups until government gets involve.
The power grid is a really poor example. It’s stuck in the past and actively holds up progress AND it’s only a quasi-government institution or rather government endorsed monopoly.
Find me a muni power grid that is still operational.
Great article. It is quite common to have municipal/county water, sewer, electric and trash hauling (like where I live in North Carolina) some of which may be contracted, but you pay the government agency.
One of the great tragedies in the pandemic was that in many states (we did a case study in West Virginia as an example), there are large fiber networks serving schools and libraries, that pass by unserved households, but are prohibited by law to serve those households so as not to “compete” with private ISPS… who in turn redlined those households due to demographics.
I’ve pitched as a solution to some of these issues that Schools be expressely allowed to resell, and maybe even required to in some circumstances, so that these DIA circuits that are delivered could service the community and act as a revenue source for the school.
By resell, I don’t mean to residential users, I mean resell to ISPs. Local fisps and wisps that would love to pay the school for connectivity and get access to it at all.