Colin Garfield has been struggling with slow internet since the days of America Online. The 33-year-old cartographer is a lifelong resident of Fort Collins, Colorado, and has bounced among AOL, Comcast, Qwest, and CenturyLink over the years as internet service providers rose, fell, or were gobbled up in mergers. At his condo in the southeastern part of town, his fastest option is DSL internet service from CenturyLink, with speeds typically maxing out at 10 megabits per second (the Federal Communications Commission has said that serviceable broadband speeds begin at 25 megabits per second). That means downloading gigabyte-sized files can take hours, and streaming a movie on Netflix requires constant buffering. “My service at home is very, very poor,” he says. “We don’t have any other options.”
In 2016, while volunteering on a public citizens’ committee, Garfield learned about a potential solution to his internet woes: a municipal broadband network. Cities around the country were experimenting with creating ISPs run by local governments rather than private corporations, with the hope of expanding internet access and driving down prices. Colorado had banned localities from creating municipal networks in 2005, but dozens of cities and counties, including Fort Collins, voted in 2015 to opt out of the statewide law. They could decide for themselves whether they wanted locally owned broadband or not.
Garfield quickly became an advocate of the idea and began hosting monthly informational meetings for the public, dubbed “Broadband & Beers,” at local breweries. This year, when the City Council decided to put the establishment of a municipal broadband network up for a public vote, he formed an advocacy group called Fort Collins Citizens Broadband Committee. The group raised about $15,000 in the run-up to the November vote, mostly through online donations, and rallied voters through Facebook ads, postcard mailers, and radio spots.
Garfield’s efforts paid off. On November 7, the municipal broadband ballot measure passed with about 57 percent of the vote. It was a win for grassroots activism and a reminder that most people around the country resent their ISP. “I think a lot of people are just really proud of the city of Fort Collins and they want to invest in a long-term project,” Garfield says. “It’s not just about your monthly bill. People really recognize the value this is going to bring long-term to the city.”
The fight for municipal broadband has been a quiet drama unfolding across dozens of cities nationwide in recent years. In addition to Colorado, around 20 states have legislation on the books curtailing the construction of city-owned broadband networks, which threaten the dominance of corporate ISPs. But a growing number of communities like Fort Collins are pushing back against these laws. Their attempts could take on added urgency because of efforts at the federal level to rework how the internet is governed. This week, the FCC is expected vote to abolish its hard-line rules protecting net neutrality, which prevent ISPs from blocking certain types of content or placing specific sites in preferential “fast lanes.” The changes could help the internet’s corporate overlords get richer and stifle the ability of smaller internet companies to compete. But municipal networks, which operate without a profit motive and generally champion equitable service, could serve as a countermeasure to the growing corporate takeover of the internet. Ultimately, city-owned ISPs may be the only neutral networks we have left.
“Competition is on the decline,” says Kit Walsh, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And as cities have tried to figure out what they can do about that, it’s become more attractive to invest in local fiber.”
The net neutrality rules themselves were created as a regulatory end run to stop overly powerful corporations from hurting consumers. “The reality is that somewhere between 50 percent and 75 percent of all households in America have one or fewer choices for high-speed broadband,” Tom Wheeler, the former FCC chairman who passed the net neutrality regulations that are being rolled back, told Fast Company in July. “And when there is no competition, who makes the rules? The rules are made by the monopolists. So the job of the FCC should be to stand up and protect consumers and promote competition and innovation in a non-competitive market.”
Without net neutrality regulations in place, competition is key to reducing anti-consumer behavior from corporations. But in the private sector, new ISP competitors are highly unlikely to emerge. Laying the wire for a robust broadband network is so expensive that even Google, one of the world’s most valuable companies, has backed off of its ambitious plans to expand its fiber service. At the same time, continual consolidation among the ISP players that remains will only insulate them further from competitive pressure. In Fort Collins, Comcast and CenturyLink told city officials that building out a fiber network throughout the city would be prohibitively expensive, and requests for other companies to do the project went unheeded, according to City Councilman Ross Cunniff.
Municipal broadband, then, offers a government-backed solution to the problem of eroding competition. There are a variety of different approaches. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, which now serves as a model for many cities considering municipal broadband, the local government owns and operates an ISP that has more than 90,000 customers. San Francisco is considering building a citywide fiber network that would be owned by the city but leased to private ISPs in order to promote competition (privacy advocates prefer this model because it separates user data from the watchful eye of the government). Fort Collins is considering selling internet service directly to customers or partnering with an existing ISP in a public-private partnership.
Overall, more than 100 communities in 24 states have publicly owned networks offering gigabit internet service. And citizens are clamoring for these kinds of options as an alternative to traditional privately owned ISPs. According to a 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of U.S. adults (including a majority of both Democrats and Republicans) believe cities should be allowed to build their own high-speed networks. While trust in the federal government is near an all-time low, most Americans continue to put faith in the ability of local government to solve problems. “People trust the city of Fort Collins much more than they trust these incumbent providers,” Cunniff says.
Of course, governmental grift is a problem nationwide, and any city-run utility is a corruptible enterprise. But Cunniff still believes internet users will have more recourse when dealing with democratically elected officials rather than private corporations. “The nice thing is that people can recall their city council members if they don’t like what they did, unlike their ISPs,” he says.
These locally owned networks may ultimately carve out a fundamentally different internet than the one shaped by the major ISPs. Though it’s unclear exactly how the CenturyLinks and Comcasts of the world will alter their business models absent net neutrality, a persistent worry is that they’ll begin prioritizing certain sites and services over others, either by charging customers to access that content or charging internet companies to access customers. The internet could start to look different based on which ISP you use, just as the roster of television channels available to you is different based on your cable provider. Cities with locally run ISPs could ensure that truly neutral networks remain an option for at least some customers. Cunniff, a software engineering manager at the chipmaker Nvidia, is pushing to ensure that strong net neutrality regulations are part of Fort Collins’s network policies as the city finalizes its buildout plan for next year. “We will not be blocking any particular content. We won’t be doing any kind of bandwidth shaping,” he says. “We’re a nonprofit. The reasons that the ISPs nationally want to go against net neutrality is they want to maximize their profits.”
Major ISPs, of course, are doing everything in their power to prevent this from happening. In Fort Collins, the campaign against municipal broadband was spearheaded by a Colorado telecom lobbying group that includes Comcast, as well as the city’s chamber of commerce, which includes CenturyLink. The groups broadcast ads claiming that the broadband initiative would take money away from public infrastructure projects, which Fort Collins’s mayor called “misinformation.”
A CenturyLink spokesperson said in an email that the company supports the FCC’s rollback of net neutrality regulations and that it will continue to provide “our customers the freedom to visit and use lawful websites and applications as they do today.” The spokesman also said that partnerships between cities and established ISPs would likely pose less of a financial risk to citizens than municipal networks that try to go it alone. A Comcast spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
There are legitimate questions about the financial viability of municipal broadband projects. While Chattanooga is championed as a successful model, a government-run broadband network in Utah was a financial disaster for taxpayers that has saddled 11 cities with $475 million in additional debt. Fort Collins’ initiative will cost $150 million and is projected to be self-sustaining once it’s taken up by 28 percent of the city’s households. A similar municipal network in nearby Longmont, Colorado, has had an even higher take rate, bolstering confidence among Fort Collins officials.
Even if Fort Collins’s network succeeds, it’s not likely to send Comcast scrambling to revamp the way it treats customers or content. The future of the free and open internet will remain in question for the vast majority of the country’s online users. But ISPs have been shamed into user-friendly practices before—Google Fiber’s splashy rollout a few years ago had the knock-on effect of scaring giants like AT&T into building more gigabit fiber networks in major markets. “The number of municipal networks out there is so small that it’s probably not going to have a deterrent effect on somebody like Comcast,” says Ryan Singel, a fellow at the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. “I think they are important for people to see as different models and to be able to try and hold those providers to those ideals in absence of the bright-line rules that the chairman [of the FCC] is getting rid of.”
Garfield, the Fort Collins lifer who helped get the municipal broadband law over the hump, certainly sees the potential for this city to inspire others—if not the Comcasts of the world, then maybe the government officials and local activists who can compete head-on with the internet giants. “Fort Collins is actually the largest community in Colorado officially to pursue this path,” Garfield says. “We’re the domino that needed to fall for other cities and counties to really take this seriously.”