Telecom Monopolies Are Once Again Funding Covert, Sleazy Local Attacks On Community Broadband Networks

We've long established that U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That's resulted in a growing number of towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.

Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, or AT&T could have responded to this trend by offering better, cheaper, faster service. But ultimately they found it far cheaper to undermine these efforts via regulatory capture, congressional lobbying, lawsuits, and misleading disinformation.

During the pandemic, U.S. telecom giants had to slow their attacks a bit, given that the pandemic was painfully illustrating the immense benefit of affordable community-owned broadband networks, and attacking them - even via proxy orgs - didn't make for great PR. But as our interest in caring about the ongoing pandemic has waned, regional telecom giants have returned to form.

Case in point: towns like Falmouth, Massachusetts have started building out faster, more affordable gigabit fiber access to locals after decades of market failure. In 2022, the town voted to establish aMunicipal Light Plant(MLP), paving the way for Falmouth to create a municipal telecommunication utility, paving the way, in turn, toward cheap, ultra-fast fiber to locals.

City-owned utilities everywhere have been jumping into broadband, much in the way they did during the rural electrification efforts a century go, where the same story played out. Market failure, created by disinterested and apathetic regional monopolies, gets upended by organized locals.

Industry. of course, doesn't much like that, so they've taken not to funding a shady non-profit dark money group that pretends to be a local, concerned citizens group" dubbed Mass Priorities." According to the Institute For Local Self Reliance, the group's entire function is to spread disinformation about the potential network in a bid to prevent its completion by undermining local support:

In recent weeks, a non-profit citizens group" that calls itself Mass Priorities has emerged out of the shadows to cast doubt on Falmouth's municipal broadband proposal...Mass Priorities has begun a series of advertisements that urge town governments on Cape Cod to invest in bridges and water utilities, and not government-owned networks. The launch is part of a $500,000 statewide media push over the next three months."

Mass Priorities," is in turn funded by a lobbying and policy group called the Domestic Policy Caucus(DPC), which claims to support transparent, public conversations on critical policy issues" and educate voters on the issues that will have the greatest impact on their community." That group is, in turn, covertly funded by regional telecom monopolies keen on undermining anything that would upset their regional monopoly power.

We've written about this kind of stuff before (see Charter creating an entirely fake consumer group in Maine to undermine community broadband efforts there). These pseudo-consumer groups almost always work to seed baseless worries about the idea that community-owned broadband networks are diabolical socialist boondoggles.

In this case, the group created a website called Stop government-backed broadband," featuring all kinds of scary stories (and misleading financial data) about how community-owned broadband is always a bad idea. They're not only attacking Falmouth's plans, but Utah's UTOPIA, one of the biggest, most popular, and most successful community broadband initiatives in the country.

Gigi Sohn (you know, the respected consumer advocate whose nomination to the FCC was scuttled by a homophobic telecom industry smear campaign) has a new (real) public advocacy group dubbed the American Association for Public Broadband, which sets the record straight:

Here they go again. Using false and tired arguments, big cable is attacking three community broadband networks that residents and their elected officials chose to build and own. And like it did earlier this year inBountiful City, Utah,it is hiding behind a surrogate that doesn't reveal its financial supporters."

There's several layers of irony here. One, the companies behind these efforts (usually Comcast, AT&T, or Charter) are so widely despised by the American public they can't participate in these conversations as themselves. They have to hide behind proxy groups pretending to be objective locals. And they think they're being clever; even though locals have generally keyed into the ruse by now.

The other irony, as Sohn's group notes, is these telecom giants have a long, long history of widespread taxpayer and subsidy fraud. They've blown through untold billions of dollars in regulatory favors, tax breaks, and subsidies for fiber networks they always somehow leave half completed, yet have the gall to create fake local groups pretending to care about fiscal responsibility:

It is profoundly ironic that the country's richest media companies are attacking government-run" networks when they are at the same time bringing in billions of dollars of subsidies from the federal government and seeking billions more in grants from state governments. When your tax dollars are on the table, these private" enterprises are more than happy to grab them with both hands."

You can generally note who is operating in good faith in these conversations if they're willing to acknowledge that regional monopolies have a long, documented history of taxpayer fraud. But these kinds of folks aren't interested in having a transparent" good faith policy conversation, they're getting paid to seed bullshit into the discourse on the behest of wildly unpopular corporations.

In Utopia's case, they're not even government run." They help local municipalities build voter-approved open access" fiber networks that lower the cost of market entry letting ISPs big and small compete using the same centralized infrastructure. Big ISPs could easily join in the fun and participate, but companies like AT&T and Comcast have, as you may have noticed, a severe allergy to real price competition.

Community broadband networks aren't some magic panacea. And if they're not planned intelligently, they can, like any business proposition, go badly. But generally speaking, community broadband (whether via a municipality, a local cooperative, or a publicly-owned utility), have been a huge boon to broadband competition and shoring up access to long-under and un-served Americans.

But their existence threatens the cozy regional monopolies lumbering telecom giants have enjoyed for decades. Such companies could respond by offering better, cheaper service, but it's much less expensive to try and undermine them via duct-taped together astroturfing" campaigns.