Is municipal broadband more important than net neutrality?

Annoyed by slower broadband speeds offered by a handful of private ISPs, multiple municipalities across the US have established their own public broadband services.

Comcast, Verizon, and other major ISPs routinely lobby against cities’ abilities to establish such networks; limits on public broadband have been enacted in 20 states so far.

“The cable companies especially have the capital to invest in bringing everyone a fast lane,” says Christopher Mitchell, director of Community Broadband Networks at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “They just don’t want to do that because they effectively have a monopoly on high-speed access.”

City-owned fiber-optic networks aren’t cheap, which is why many cities across the US continue to rely on private ISPs. But the public networks that are constructed have their intended effect, Mitchell says: Private ISPs drop their broadband prices and increase broadband speeds.

Put aside, for a moment, the notion of “fast lanes” bandied about in the current net neutrality fervor: the real problem is a lack of competition due to much of the US broadband market being controlled by large, private ISPs, a situation well documented by Harvard law professor Susan Crawford in her book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

There’s a better way than the interconnection agreements proposed by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler. Why not instead undo the barriers facing municipal broadband instead?