On Tuesday evening, President Obama
released a video
on the White House Facebook page endorsing municipalities to provide broadband
networks. On Wednesday afternoon, he will give a speech in Iowa outlining the
contents of the latest report from the Executive Office of the President
entitled “Community-Based
Broadband Solutions: The Benefits of Competition and Choice for Community
Development and Highspeed Internet Access.”
As FSF Scholars discussed in their comments
to the FCC back in August, the FCC lacks the legal authority to preempt state
laws restricting municipal broadband networks. These comments and additional FSF
blogs (here
and here)
have outlined why municipal broadband inherently creates an anticompetitive
market, because municipalities do not operate through profit and loss, placing
large burdens onto taxpayers.
Additionally, a former classmate of mine at
George Mason University, Brian Deignan, recently wrote a paper entitled “Community
Broadband, Community Benefits? An Economic Analysis of Local Government
Broadband Initiatives,” which was also blogged about at Tech
Liberation Front. In his paper, he empirically found that municipal
broadband networks have very modest positive effects on the economy, if any,
while the growth in local government and burden on taxpayers are too large to
ignore.
Increasing high-speed Internet access throughout
the country is an admirable goal. But instead of the government providing
access, the focus of the government should be to reduce regulatory barriers at
all levels to pave the way for private providers to increase high-speed
broadband access. 
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