AT&T Lobbyists Have Been Writing State Broadband Laws [telecom]

States Wake Up, Realize AT&T Lobbyists Have Been Writing Awful Protectionist State Broadband Laws

For more than fifteen years now companies like Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink have quite literally paid state legislatures to write protectionist broadband laws. These laws, passed in around 20 states, protect the incumbent duopoly from the faintest specter of broadband competition -- by preventing towns and cities from either building their own broadband networks, or from striking public/private partnerships to improve lagging broadband networks. They're the worst sort of protectionism, written by ISPs and pushed by ALEC and ISP lobbyists to do one thing: protect industry revenues.

Despite the fact the laws strip away citizen rights to decide local infrastructure matters for themselves (because really, who better to decide your town's needs than AT&T or Comcast executives), ISPs for more than a decade managed to forge division by framing this as a partisan issue. But then something changed: companies like Google Fiber and Tucows began highlighting how public/private partnerships are actually a great way to fill in the broadband gaps left by an apathetic, uncompetitive broadband duopoly.

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Bill Horne
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