To Save the Internet We Must Own the Networks | By David Morris | Common Dreams

To Save the Internet We Must Own the Networks | By David Morris | Common Dreams:

The tools to build locally owned networks may well be there as the author of this article concludes. But adequate funding is another question. Constructing telecommunications infrastructure is very costly and labor intensive. It’s far easier to do in places where local municipal and cooperatively owned electric distribution and telecommunications networks already exist and have supporting infrastructure and funding mechanisms in place. Many of these entities got their start in the early in the 20th century with robust federal funding.

Nearly a century later, there is no meaningful federal funding to support the formation of new local entities to construct and operate advanced fiber telecommunications networks. State and local budgets are strained with obligations to repair and replace other aging infrastructure and honor pension obligations to their workers. They can’t be expected to provide billions to finance locally owned telecom networks.

Without government funding in the form of technical assistance grants and loans, expecting property owners and consumers to come up with the money is highly uncertain outside of highly affluent communities. As price takers rather than the price makers they would be the owners of local infrastructure, they are accustomed to purchasing “broadband” as a commodity monthly service and grudgingly tolerating exorbitant monthly costs and annual rate increases from incumbent telephone and cable companies. They’re unlikely to be motivated to put up the money to build an alternative -- albeit better -- network infrastructure than currently available to them unless they live in a neighborhood redlined by the incumbents.

Local ownership of telecom infrastructure is in concept a meritorious idea. But without a coordinated and well-funded federal program for it that recognizes that local infrastructure is essential to a vital interstate telecommunications network and not a local amenity like a park or playground, it remains only that.