Netflix, Google and other companies have joined forced to fight a new Colorado bill that would make it more difficult for Colorado towns and cities to improve local broadband via public/private broadband partnerships. Colorado is one of twenty states that has passed ISP-lobbied bills that hinder community broadband. But last fall, countless towns began overwhelmingly voting to exempt themselves from Colorado's version of these protectionist laws, SB 152.
With Colorado communities making it clear they want to decide their local broadband future themselves, ISPs are again lobbying against the public interest.
ISPs appear to have nudged Colorado state Senator Kerry Donovan to push SB 136, which Donovan claims is designed to "modernize" the original bill pushed for by ISPs in the state. Critics however have stated that the bill's goal is to over-ride the public interest and once again stack the legislative deck in favor of big broadband ISPs.
“This seems to have been what [Donovan] is coming out with after working with industry,” Pitkin County Commissioner Rachel Richards complained earlier this year. “This bill is backwards. It may put us back under provisions we just got out of with the SB-152 vote. And it seems somewhat industry-oriented.”
Among other things, this new bill would call anything over 256 kbps "broadband," while fiddling with zip code definitions of "served" to make incumbent broadband coverage look better than it actually is.
As such, Google, Netflix, and a coalition of other organizations have fired off a letter (pdf) to Colorado legislators urging them to block the bill because it would only serve to expand the current barriers to community broadband and public-private partnerships in Colorado.
"Communities in Colorado and across America are eager to work with willing established carriers, to enter into public-private partnerships with new entrants, to develop their own networks, if necessary, or to create other innovative means of acquiring affordable access to advanced communications capabilities," states the letter. "These are fundamentally local decisions that should be made by the communities themselves, through the processes that their duly elected and accountable local officials ordinarily use for making comparable decisions."
In short, big ISPs paid Colorado politicians to pass a law protecting the status quo (limited competition, poor services, high prices). When locals overwhelmingly voted against such protectionist bills, ISPs and some politicians responded by trying to pass an update that would once again make it more difficult for towns and cities to do anything about dysfunctional, local broadband duopolies.
Again, it's important to remember that towns and cities wouldn't be looking to get into the broadband business (or turning to public private projects) if they were happy with local broadband options. And while ISP lobbyists have tried to frame this is a partisan issue to quite intentionally sow division for more than a decade, letting communities decide for themselves the best broadband path forward has overwhelming bipartisan support in the state.
