Gigi Sohn on how to defeat opponents of public broadband

Gigi Sohn joins Nicole Ferraro to discuss a recent effort by the community of Longmeadow (MA) to construct and launch a town-owned fiber network, until the project was defeated with a town vote rejecting a measure to fund construction. That rejection followed what town officials describe as an onslaught of misinformation spread by a group called Mass Priorities, a project of the Domestic Policy Council, which is known to fund efforts to defeat municipal broadband projects and has suspected ties to the region's incumbent cable provider, Comcast. While the Mass Priorities-led "dark money campaign," as Sohn calls it, worked in the case of Longmeadow, similar efforts to defeat municipal broadband networks have failed elsewhere. Take Bountiful (UT), for example, which overcame its own battle against the Utah Taxpayers Association, another organization with ties to the cable industry.