David Morris

In another seeming flareup of his chronic foot-in-mouth disease, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on May 11 told the Huffington Post that the president “denied the merger” sought by AT&T and Time-Warner.

[Commentary] The only sure fire strategy to regain control of this vital underpinning of modern economies is for us to own the broadband networks themselves. Only then will we able make the rules that serve the public interest. Decisions about caps and rates and access, about the digital divide and net neutrality and privacy can and should be debated and made at the local level, not in some distant boardroom or in even more distant federal agencies and federal courts.

New financial disclosures for a November ballot initiative show that a group backed by private internet providers spent just over $900,000 to try and block city-owned broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado.

[Commentary] In a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, 60 Republicans insisted that the federal government shouldn't interfere with the 20 state laws that either prohibit or severely inhibit municipally owned broadband networks.

The debate about whether to build a muni broadband network has proven to be one of the most considered, transparent and democratic of all policy debates, certainly far more considered than those made in Washington and state capitols. Republicans and private telecoms maintain that cities lack the capacity to build and manage broadband networks.

They're empirically wrong. Of the 160 municipally owned broadband networks, the successes vastly outnumber the failures. Muni networks, not Google, offered the first gigabit service. Muni networks have saved their communities hundreds of millions of dollars, created tens of thousands of jobs, and become a firm foundation for economic-development initiatives.

[Morris is Director, The Public Good Initiative, Institute for Local Self-Reliance]