The Net Age

And Big Corporations May Come Out on the Losing Side
Fed up with Internet monopoly, cities have begun to take things into their own hands.
By  Christopher Mitchell  and David Morris, AlterNet.net

“A battle is raging for control of the Internet and it is not taking place in Washington. Scores of cities, fed up with the recalcitrance and outright arrogance of their providers and Washington’s lack of action are taking their information future into their own hands by building their own high-speed networks. To Harold DePriest, head of Chattanooga’s municipally owned fiber network, currently the largest in the country, the issue is clear: “Does our community control our own fate or does someone else control it?”

He who owns the information highways makes the rules of the road. Today those rules are made by a handful of global corporations with little public oversight.

The 1996 Telecommunication Act was based on the almost religious belief that if we deregulated the Internet sector competition alone would improve services, drive down rates and generate even more competition. Just the opposite has happened. Competition is down. Rates are up. The combination of deregulation and monopoly has resulted in sky-high prices coupled with laughable slow speeds compared to those readily available to households and businesses in Europe and Asia.

Today states can require phone and cable companies to offer a low basic rate. The result is that in Minneapolis the cost of basic cable — 20 channels including CNN and CSPAN — is about $15 a month…

Fed up with slow and overpriced service, anxious to design a network that can meet the demands of a modern economy and serve the needs of their businesses and households, cities have begun constructing and operating their own fiber to the home (FTTH) networks. Unsurprisingly, most of today’s municipal broadband pioneers were municipal electricity pioneers a century ago. That movement, which resulted in over 2,000 cities owning their own electric networks, was driven by startlingly similar concerns: the knowledge that electricity would become essential infrastructure in 20th-century economies and the fear that private companies would bypass small cities and poor and working-class neighborhoods.

Today cities know that high-speed information networks will be the essential infrastructure of a 21st-century economy and fear that private cable and phone companies will again ignore smaller cities and target wealthier households and businesses.

So far some 55 cities in 27 states own a publicly owned fiber network. Most are small: Bristol, VA; Morristown, TN; Spencer, IA; Windom, MN. Recently larger cities have joined their ranks: Chattanooga, population 170,000; Lafayette, population 120,000. Seattle’s new mayor was elected on a platform that included building such a network…”