State Lawmaker Tries To Ratf*ck Community-Owned Broadband Effort In Frankfort, Kentucky

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

We’ve noted numerous times how U.S. communities are increasingly tired of substandard, expensive broadband caused by market failure, so they’re building their own broadband networks at a record pace. These efforts take a wide variety of forms, whether it’s via a local cooperative, a collection of municipalities, or a city owned utility (see Chattanooga’s huge successes in Tennessee).

We’ve also noted that there’s also no limit of sleazy, underhanded efforts by regional telecom monopolies (most commonly Charter, Comcast, and AT&T) to sue, harass, or hammer these efforts into oblivion. Often by using lazy lawmakers (remember when House Republicans tried to ban community broadband in the middle of a plague?), and often via fake consumer groups created to seed disinformation.

Case in point: Kentucky has seen some notable success with broadband deployment in Frankfort, Kentucky, thanks to the city-owned nonprofit utility — the Frankfort Plant Board (FPB). FPB has provided affordable, gigabit fiber to around 16,000 broadband customers that historically only had the option of slow, expensive AT&T DSL service, or slow, expensive Charter cable service.

Enter Republican Kentucky State Senator Gex Williams. Williams doesn’t live in Frankfort, and he doesn’t have the support of Frankfort, yet he’s pushing a bill in the state legislature that would force FPB to sell its popular network to a private company, while subjecting the utility to all manner of new bureaucratic restrictions on how the non profit can spend its own money.

The problem: Frankfort locals like FPB, nobody wants FPB to sell its service, and there’s absolutely no evidence that there are any issues requiring additional oversight of the utility. City officials oppose the effort, and passed a resolution in support of the utility. The utility itself has resorted to running an awareness campaign informing locals about the legislative attack, which hasn’t been tabled yet:

“FPB is a non-profit public utility owned and operated by our customers. You should be the only ones who have the voice to make the decision to sell FPB. Is Sen. Williams saying that he knows better than our entire community what is best for us when he doesn’t even live here?”

To hear Williams’ side of the story, he just woke up one day believing that a popular city-owned utility in a town he doesn’t live in shouldn’t exist. In reality, this has all the usual telltale signs of either a Charter or AT&T political ratfucking operation designed to undermine a popular, community-owned competitor under the pretense it’s somehow helping.

As we’ve noted in other similar efforts (like that time Charter created a fake consumer group in Maine to scare locals away from locally-owned broadband networks), regional telecom monopolies always had the option of pre-empting these kinds of initiatives by providing better, faster, less expensive broadband more uniformly.

But it’s generally cheaper and easier to throw a few thousand in campaign contributions at a politician, lobby for laws banning such efforts, file lawsuits, or run dodgy smear campaigns maligning voter-approved initiatives as “socialism run amok.” Despite the fact most of these networks are being built in conservative cities, with bipartisan voter approval. Again, due to obvious market failure.

Most of these networks are the organic, grass roots, local response to decades of being screwed by predatory regional telecom monopolies. Monopolies that, for thirty years, have worked tirelessly to undermine local competition so they can provide the bare-minimum service at the maximum price to captive local customers (assuming they can bother to connect you in the first place).

It’s not much different from rural electrification efforts a hundred years ago, where pissed off communities bonded together to deliver affordable electricity in the wake of market failure caused by apathetic, giant utilities protected by corrupt state and federal lawmakers.

Big companies like AT&T and Charter can’t just come out and directly say they hate voter-approved local infrastructure initiatives that provide affordable fiber to long-neglected communities, because they’d be laughed out of town. So instead they employ no limit of proxy groups, legislators, and consultants to undermine the efforts under the pretense of caring so much about these local communities.

Most of the time, as in the case of Frankfort, locals quickly see through the ruse. But that still doesn’t mean that captured state legislatures aren’t keen to protect hated regional monopolies from public backlash at every conceivable opportunity. Much to the detriment of locals who have spent the last thirty years stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Filed Under: broadband, city owned utility, community broadband, fiber, frankfort plant board, gex williams, high speed internet, kentucky, telecom