The City That Was Saved by the Internet

The “Chattanooga Choo Choo” sign over the old terminal station is purely decorative, a throwback. Since the Southern Railroad left town in the early 1970s, the southeastern Tennessee city has been looking for an identity that has nothing to do with a bygone big band song or an abandoned train. It’s finally found one in another huge infrastructure project: The Gig. At a time when small cities, towns, and rural areas are seeing an exodus of young people to large cities and a precipitous decline in solidly middle class jobs, the Gig has helped Chattanooga thrive and create a new identity for itself.

Chattanooga and many of the other 82 other cities and towns in the United States that have thus far built their own government-owned, fiber-based Internet are held up as examples for the rest of the country to follow. Like the presence of well-paved roads, good Internet access doesn’t guarantee that a city will be successful. But the lack of it guarantees that a community will get left behind as the economy increasingly demands that companies compete not just with their neighbors next door, but with the entire world. But not every rural community can just lay its own fiber. Cities and towns that build their own Internet have found themselves squarely in the crosshairs of telecommunication lobbyists and lawyers, who have managed to enact laws making it difficult or illegal to build government-owned networks. But the success of these networks is beginning to open eyes around the country: If we start treating the Internet not as a product sold by a company but as a necessary utility, can the economic prospects of rural America be saved?