from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept
We’ve noted for years how U.S. regional telecom monopolies have effectively crushed competition in many U.S. markets and utterly defanged our regulators. This one-two punch of muted competition and no oversight routinely results in expensive, slow, spotty broadband access.
Frustrated by this, communities all over the U.S. have responded to this market and regulatory failure by building their own, more affordable, fiber networks. At last count there were somewhere around 400 such networks providing cheap fiber to 700 communities nationwide. There was a big boom during COVID born out of frustration from home telecommuting and education broadband problems.
One of the biggest and most popular such networks in the U.S. is UTOPIA Fiber, which is an open access fiber network serving 23 markets, mostly across Utah. UTOPIA offers fiber speeds up to 10 Gbps across 19 different partner ISPs, all competing on price and customer service. Such open access fiber deployments are a useful, local, and popular way to dismantle the monopoly logjam on internet access.
Recently, UTOPIA (now operating in the green after years of heavy fiber investment) began expanding broadband access into the town of Bountiful, Utah, population 46,000. Big broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast didn’t much like that. But because they have such terrible reputations, and UTOPIA is so popular, they didn’t feel they could attack the project directly.
So they did what they always do: they funded a dodgy proxy group to try and scare locals away from supporting the project. In this case it was called the “Utah Taxpayer Association,” and it’s a nonprofit funded by telecoms, pretending to be an objective third party simply concerned about the potential impact of the project on local taxpayers.
Except when the group went door to door to try and tell false and scary stories about how community broadband is dangerous to taxpayers, it failed completely because locals quickly sniffed out that the group wasn’t actually local:
“A dark money group called Utah Taxpayers Association financed a petition effort to force a vote on project funding. It hired signature collectors to try to persuade registered voters to oppose the project.
Timmerman said the signature campaign failed because residents would ask, “Who do you work for?” and the signature gatherers didn’t even know who was behind the campaign. And when residents asked, “Are you a resident of Bountiful?” the signature gatherers said, “No.”
Although these dark money groups don’t disclose their donors, one can only assume that they were funded by the incumbent providers in Bountiful, which include Comcast and CenturyLink. However, there is no verification of exactly who was behind the campaigns.”
You don’t have to assume, it’s on record. Such campaigns don’t cost these providers much. AT&T gave this particular group $1,163 during a six month span last year according to financial disclosure records. Comcast and Centurylink also sponsor the group’s annual conference. All entirely coincidental, I’m sure.
Telecom giants like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter have spent much of the last few years trying to derail these kinds of community-owned networks. Either by spreading lies about them, or trying to sue them out of existence. UTOPIA’s creation years ago was immediately met with a lawsuit from Qwest (now Centurylink/Lumen) which saddled the effort with extra legal costs right out of the gates.
Big telecom has also employed the help of Republicans, who have, at several different points (including during peak COVID lockdowns when affordable fiber was essential) tried to impose a federal ban on such popular networks. Loyal Republican puppets can often be found making up absurd claims about municipal broadband, like lies that they somehow “harm the First Amendment.”
The great irony is that telecom giants could derail such efforts by providing better, cheaper, and faster broadband access. But it’s generally cheaper to fund a few dodgy proxy groups, or bribe a senator, than it is push fiber out into neighborhoods they don’t care about because the ROI is two years longer than some bean counter would like. So here we are.
In this case it failed, spectacularly. As a result, Bountiful residents have access to a UTOPIA network, being paid for via bond, that’s offering gigabit fiber for as little as $50 a month. You can see why executives at companies like Comcast are afraid of this sort of model, the benefits of which we outlined in a Techdirt/Copia paper three years ago.
Filed Under: affordable, astroturfing, community broadband, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, municipal, utah
Companies: at&t, centurylink, comcast, utah taxpayers association, utopia
