Overcoming Obstacles to Municipal Fiber Networks

Nineteen million Americans cannot access the Internet from home, and tens of millions more only have slow unreliable access. Meanwhile, nations who once looked at the U.S. as a leader in technological innovation are connecting greater portions of their people to the fastest communications technology on the planet fiber optics. Unfortunately, less than 20% of Americans currently have home access to fiber optic communications. And the private sector has stopped building new fiber networks because investors don’t want to wait for them to pay off. Fortunately, local governments have started to fill the gaps by building fiber networks and providing their communities with world-class broadband Internet access. But cable and telecom industry lobbyists have pushed nineteen states to enact restrictions against municipal broadband provision in order to protect their broadband market dominance. A major force pushing municipal broadband restrictions through state legislatures is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Under the pretext of promoting “free markets” and “level playing fields” for its corporate constituents, ALEC drafts model bills for its member legislators to introduce in their respective state capitols. Currently, nineteen states have passed ALEC-inspired laws restricting municipal broadband provision and more are considering the same. This paper will discuss these state laws and analyze their underlying policies. In the process, relevant facts will be presented to challenge the rhetoric surrounding the enactments. The paper concludes with a call for federal preemption of these state laws and a discussion of ways municipalities can navigate the restrictions to proceed with various forms of limited fiber broadband deployment. The timeliness of this research is apparent from the FCC’s recent announcement of a “Gigabit City Challenge,” calling for at least one gigabit-broadband connected community in all fifty states by 2015. The aforementioned municipal broadband restrictions pose a direct threat to this FCC initiative by substantially limiting who can offer the desired services. Another recent event which underscores the timeliness of this research was FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s statement on February 15, 2013, about state municipal broadband laws. While the Georgia legislature was deliberating enactment of municipal broadband restrictions, Genachowski released a statement declaring: If a community can’t gain access to broadband services that meet its needs, then it should be able to serve its own residents directly. Proposals that would tie the hands of innovative communities that want to build their own highspeed networks will slow progress to our nation’s broadband goals and will hurt economic development and job creation in those areas. In agreement with Genachowski, I will advocate for federal preemption of state restrictions against municipal broadband and discuss ways for municipalities to circumvent such restrictions in the meantime.