At the John Locke Foundation, we’ve been writing about municipal broadband for years. We’ve never been fans. As my colleague, Jon Sanders, wrote,
A private company cannot legally take money from others involuntarily, whether they are customers and especially if they are not. A private company that cannot stop its losses or cease bleeding money soon ceases to be. A government entrant into the market, however, comes with the guarantee of its losses being borne by taxpayers (or, in some instances here, electricity ratepayers). This guarantee conveys a significant competitive advantage, one that can be leveraged even further to offer heavily discounted rates to serve the government’s want for an incentive to offer businesses for economic development purposes.
That’s the fundamental problem.
So when Wilson’s municipal broadband company wanted to expand into neighboring counties, the legislature said no. They passed a law requiring a number of things, one of which was that Wilson’s broadband company had to limit it’s operations to Wilson county.
Wilson didn’t like that, so they appealed to the FCC, who made a bad ruling and overturned that state law.
But the saga didn’t end there, and a few weeks, a federal court overthrew the FCC ruling. Thankfully, the city of Wilson has accepted that, will not seek further expansion outside the county, and isn’t appealing.
This is good news for the taxpayers who subsidize Wilson’s broadband, and it’s good news for taxpayers in other communities who could have found themselves on the hook for their own municipal broadband companies. After so many months and years, this is a good resolution to a messy problem.
