We’ve mentioned a few times that there are more than $42 billion in broadband subsides about to drop in the laps of state leaders thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill. Since the bill gives individual states leeway on how this money is spent, a lot of states (like Pennsylvania) are simply throwing the money in the laps of giant telecom monopolies with long histories of subsidy fraud and abuse.

Some states, like California and New York, are, thankfully, doing things a little differently. Hopefully.

California, for example, is spending $3 billion of its funding on a massive open access “middle mile” network that should drive down access costs and boost competition. There’s been some consternation as to how transparently and inclusively California leaders are doing this, but it’s a strong idea.

New York, meanwhile, is directing a lot of its COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding to community owned and operated broadband networks, which saw a massive surge in popularity during the home education broadband headaches during COVID lockdowns. Said lockdowns illustrated that broadband is an essential utility, and that widespread monopolization has clearly led to market failure.

New York just announced that $70 million of a broader $228 million program will be headed to community-owned broadband networks. Like the one being built in Dryden, New York, which is offering locals previously stuck under a Charter cable broadband monopoly symmetrical 400 Mbps, 700 Mbps, and 1 Gbps connections for $45, $75, and $90 a month, respectively.

According to a New York state announcement, many of these areas will be getting affordable fiber broadband for the first time ever:

“These awards through the Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program will connect tens of thousands of homes and businesses across Upstate New York and deliver reliable high-speed internet service to areas of the state that are unserved and underserved while addressing ConnectALL’s mandate to develop a robust, equitable broadband marketplace across New York State.”

A good chunk of the funding is being spent on “open access” fiber networks, which effectively provide multiple providers — municipally owned or private –the low cost ability to provide service. That boosts competition, and in most places where it’s implemented, results in cheaper, better service (I wrote a report on this phenomenon for the Copia Institute last year in case you missed it).

Contrary to what big telecom and its assorted mouthpieces like to claim, community broadband is an organic, grass roots response to monopoly power and market failure, and sees broad, bipartisan support. Which is why telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast tried to have House Republicans impose a national ban in the middle of a national health emergency that was busy highlighting its importance.

Community broadband isn’t magic. It needs to be implemented and funded intelligently. It can take on many forms, from an extension of your local power utility or a cooperative, to a municipally owned network or a hybrid public-private partnership. These creative, popular, local solutions are again a direct result of decades of apathy by regional telecom monopolies that have lobbied many leaders into apathy.

We’ve mentioned a few times that there are more than $42 billion in broadband subsides about to drop in the laps of state leaders thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill. Since the bill gives individual states leeway on how this money is spent, a lot of states (like Pennsylvania) are simply throwing the money in the laps of giant telecom monopolies with long histories of subsidy fraud and abuse.

Some states, like California and New York, are, thankfully, doing things a little differently. Hopefully.

California, for example, is spending $3 billion of its funding on a massive open access “middle mile” network that should drive down access costs and boost competition. There’s been some consternation as to how transparently and inclusively California leaders are doing this, but it’s a strong idea.

New York, meanwhile, is directing a lot of its COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding to community owned and operated broadband networks, which saw a massive surge in popularity during the home education broadband headaches during COVID lockdowns. Said lockdowns illustrated that broadband is an essential utility, and that widespread monopolization has clearly led to market failure.

New York just announced that $70 million of a broader $228 million program will be headed to community-owned broadband networks. Like the one being built in Dryden, New York, which is offering locals previously stuck under a Charter cable broadband monopoly symmetrical 400 Mbps, 700 Mbps, and 1 Gbps connections for $45, $75, and $90 a month, respectively.

According to a New York state announcement, many of these areas will be getting affordable fiber broadband for the first time ever:

“These awards through the Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program will connect tens of thousands of homes and businesses across Upstate New York and deliver reliable high-speed internet service to areas of the state that are unserved and underserved while addressing ConnectALL’s mandate to develop a robust, equitable broadband marketplace across New York State.”

A good chunk of the funding is being spent on “open access” fiber networks, which effectively provide multiple providers — municipally owned or private –the low cost ability to provide service. That boosts competition, and in most places where it’s implemented, results in cheaper, better service (I wrote a report on this phenomenon for the Copia Institute last year in case you missed it).

Contrary to what big telecom and its assorted mouthpieces like to claim, community broadband is an organic, grass roots response to monopoly power and market failure, and sees broad, bipartisan support. Which is why telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast tried to have House Republicans impose a national ban in the middle of a national health emergency that was busy highlighting its importance.

Community broadband isn’t magic. It needs to be implemented and funded intelligently. It can take on many forms, from an extension of your local power utility or a cooperative, to a municipally owned network or a hybrid public-private partnership. These creative, popular, local solutions are again a direct result of decades of apathy by regional telecom monopolies that have lobbied many leaders into apathy.

When the Trump administration killed net neutrality, telecom industry giants convinced them to push their luck and declared that not only would federal regulators no longer try to meaningfully oversee telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T, but that states couldn’t either. They got greedy.

The courts didn’t like that much, repeatedly ruling that the FCC can’t abdicate its authority over broadband consumer protection, then turn around tell states what they can or can’t do.

The courts took that stance again last week, with a new ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit restoring a New York State law (the Affordable Broadband Act) requiring that ISPs provide low-income state residents $15 broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps. The law was blocked in June of 2021 by a US District Judge who claimed that the state law was preempted by the federal net neutrality repeal.

Giant ISPs, and the Trump administration officials who love them, desperately tried to insist that states were magically barred from regulating broadband because the Trump administration said so. But the appeals court ruled, once again, those efforts aren’t supported by logic or the law:

“the ABA is not conflict-preempted by the Federal Communications Commission’s 2018 order classifying broadband as an information service. That order stripped the agency of its authority to regulate the rates charged for broadband Internet, and a federal agency cannot exclude states from regulating in an area where the agency itself lacks regulatory authority. Accordingly, we REVERSE the judgment of the district court and VACATE the permanent injunction.”

This ruling is once again good news for future fights over net neutrality and broadband consumer protection, Stanford Law Professor and net neutrality expert Barbara van Schewick notes in a statement:

“Today’s decision means that if a future FCC again decided to abdicate its oversight over broadband like it did in 2017, the states have strong legal precedent, across circuits, to institute their own protections or re-activate dormant ones.”

Telecom lobbyists have spent years lobbying to ensure federal broadband oversight is as captured and feckless as possible. And, with the occasional exception, they’ve largely succeeded. Big telecom had really hoped they could extend that winning streak even further and bar states from standing up to them as well, but so far that really hasn’t gone as planned.

One of the things that absolutely terrifies telecom monopoly lobbyists is the idea of rate regulation, or that government would ever stop them from ripping off captive customers stuck in uncompetitive markets. It’s never been a serious threat on the federal level due to regulatory capture and lobbying, even though it’s thrown around a lot by monopoly apologists as a terrifying bogeyman akin to leprosy.

Here you not only have a state retaining its authority to protect consumers from monopoly harm, but dictating to them that they must provide poor people with 25 Mbps broadband (which really costs ISPs at Comcast’s scale virtually nothing to provide in the gigabit era). Still, it’s the kind of ruling that’s going to give AT&T and Comcast lobbyists (and consultants and think tank proxies) cold sweats for years.