U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to.
In some cases, these industry ghost written laws even ban municipalities from even engaging in public/private partnerships. It’s a scenario where ISPs get to have their cake and eat it too; they often refuse to upgrade their networks in under-served areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), but also get to write shitty laws preventing these under-served towns from doing anything about it.
This dance of dysfunction has been particularly interesting in Colorado, however. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contains a provision that lets individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum. Whoops.
With pandemic frustration mounting over sub-standard broadband and awful customer service, communities keep taking advantage of the opt out clause as municipalities increasingly explore building better, faster, more affordable fiber networks. As of last November’s election, more than 121 cities and towns in the state have opted out of the dumb state restrictions:
The result of all those ballots cast since Glenwood Springs first lifted the restriction on municipal broadband in the spring of 2008 is the installation of hundreds of miles of new fiber-optic lines throughout the Centennial State, from tiny Wray near the Kansas border to even smaller Mountain Village near Telluride — and dozens of communities in between.
These bills are usually framed by telecom monopolies (and the think tankers, consultants, and academics paid to rhetorically support every dumb policy decision they make) as necessary to protect helpless taxpayers from wasting money. Those concerns oddly disappear every time AT&T or Comcast gets billions in tax breaks or regulatory favors for networks they don’t actually deliver.
Those same folks will also prattle on at length about the need for government to get out of dictating winners and losers. Yet here you’ve got AT&T executives 1,000 miles away dictating what voters can or can’t do with their own local infrastructure via state laws they’ve effectively written and purchased that overrule local citizen voting rights.
Colorado is the only state that included such an opt-out clause. Two other states, Arkansas and Washington, largely removed the restrictions after the pandemic made it abundantly clear they were pointlessly hampering innovative network builds. There are still however 17 states with such laws on the books whose entire function is to protect monopolies from meaningful change.
