Colorado Eyes Killing State Law Prohibiting Community Broadband Networks

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 and areas where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to upgrade their networks.

Quite often, these industry ghost written laws even ban municipalities from 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 even if such efforts are approved by the majority of voters.

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.

As a result, more than 121 Colorado communities have opted out of the restrictions in a bid to improve local broadband access. And now state leaders are finally considering eliminating the pointless law entirely via SB183:

If passed, the new proposed legislation (SB-183) – co-sponsored by a bipartisan-ish group of state legislators (10 Democrats and 2 Republicans) – would neuter SB-152 and allow local communities to decide for themselves if they wanted to pursue municipal broadband without needing special permission from the state.

COVID lockdowns and the home education and telework bills did a fabulous job highlighting these dumb laws, which effectively exist to shield local monopolies from any sort of disruption. In this case, that disruption comes in the form of an organic, voter-approved response to widespread market failure that’s left Americans paying an arm and a leg for what’s often spotty, substandard broadband access.

Two states, Washington and Arkansas, already dramatically scaled back their state restrictions during COVID, leaving seventeen states that still have some kind of pointless restrictions on the books. For a while, telecom giants successfully scared Americans away from community-owned and -operated broadband networks by claiming they were inherent taxpayer boondoggles or “socialism.”

But data routinely shows that such networks offer faster, cheaper, and better broadband access than that of many private sector monopolies. Locally owned ISPs also tend to be more directly accountable to locals because they are locals. And such efforts often prod telecom monopolies routinely pampered by regulatory capture and muted competition to actually try harder.

Most of the most interesting work going on in the telecom sector continues to be at the hands of municipalities, cooperatives, or city-owned utilities frustrated by decades of monopoly power. Big ISPs could have thwarted this movement at any time by providing better, cheaper, faster access — but it’s generally easier to pay off captured state lawmakers for protectionist laws instead.