Whoops: Cable Giant Cable One Accidentally Sends Rival Email Saying Their Top Priority Is Killing Community-Funded Broadband

Telecom monopolies have spent decades trying to kill off public broadband efforts. Whether it's outright lies about what municipal broadband will do or shitty protectionist laws specifically designed to undermine the will of voters, U.S. telecom monopolies have long been absolutely terrified of your long-neglected town or city voting to build its own broadband network.

Since blocking you from being able to determine your town or city's infrastructure needs is widely unpopular, telecom monopolies usually have to resort to paying nonprofits, consultants, captured regulators, or think tankers to demonize community broadband via a rotating array of cherry-picked bullshit.

Cable Giant Cable One apparently didn't get that memo, and this week was caught accidentally sending a competitor an email admitting that the company's top priority is attacking publicly funded alternative broadband networks. Not improving its network, boosting speeds, or improving customer service, but attacking the growing number of towns and cities where voters have decided to build better, faster, cheaper, local fiber networks:

Challenging publicly funded overbuilds is becoming one of the most important tasks we do as a company," Cable One Assistant General Counsel Patrick Caron wrote in the email.

In telecom circles, overbuilds" is the code word for any new competitors that dare build new infrastructure in existing monopoly footprints. Generally, telecom monopolies have been lobbying overtime to ensure that the $50+ billion in looming broadband subsidies coming from COVID relief and infrastructure bills go only to unserved areas, not toward competitors that could threaten them.

They're doing this in a variety of ways, including filing costly challenges against towns or city broadband grant applicants that often lack the resources to fight back, using flawed FCC data to falsely claim that any new broadband build is somehow duplicative." Duplicative or not, one of the biggest obstacles to broadband access is affordability, and you directly tackle affordability by challenging monopolies through additional competitive options.

The industry's usual response, as Cable One does in its response to Ars Technica, is to claim they're simply engaging in some kind of taxpayer-protecting, altruistic public service as they attempt to scuttle popular, community supported broadband builds that directly threaten their captive revenues:

Cable One has been fairly vocal in local and national media and in other public forums over the past several months about our strong belief in the importance of the challenge process. Cable One believes its good-faith participation in challenge processes is important for two reasons: 1) to ensure that limited public funding is used for the purpose intended extending critical broadband services to unserved/underserved areas; and 2) to protect the network/infrastructure and customer service investments of companies already providing qualifying service in the area.

In short, regional cable monopolies want the lion's share of taxpayer dollars going to their perpetually, mysteriously, unfinished and fraud-laden digital divide efforts in unserved areas (20-40 million Americans lack broadband of any kind).

They most definitely don't want public taxpayer money going to something like a popular locally owned utility, municipality, small ISP public-private partnership, or popular local cooperative that's actually going to challenge monopoly control (83 million Americans currently live under a broadband monopoly).

Understand this: the 1000+ U.S. communities getting into the broadband business aren't doing it because it's fun, or they like to waste your money. They're doing it because 35+ years of market failure and feckless regulatory oversight has resulted in them overpaying for substandard monopoly broadband and atrocious customer service. They're sick and tired of it, and they're actually doing something about it.

Regional cable giants could nip the movement in the bud by deploying faster, better, and more affordable service, but it's generally much cheaper to exploit U.S. corruption, undermine the will of voters, pass shitty protectionist laws, bog grant applications down in spurious and unnecessary challenges, and demonize absolutely any effort to do anything differently.