Municipal networks are cheaper and faster
than the ones that cable and telephone duopolists build after being
given exclusive franchises to serve cities, which is why the FCC had to
issue an order banning cities to stop building them – in the absence of
such an order, it seems likely that most of America would end up using
municipal internet connections (unlike today, when 100,000,000 Americans are served by a single ISP).
Thus it should come as no surprise that 750+ US communities have already
built their own municipal internet networks, often in the teeth of vicious, multimillion-dollar scare campaigns from ISPs, featuring such laughable lies as “this means state-funded pornography production.”
But what is surprising is the political composition of these towns and
cities: they are most frequently conservative-leaning, Republican-voting
places. This is presumably bad news for the Congressional Republicans
who are likely to have to publicly vote to support or oppose Congressional review of the Trump FCC’s Net Neutrality-killing order.
