For years, incumbent phone and cable companies were lobbying state lawmakers to pass laws banning towns and cities from wiring themselves with broadband, even in cases where incumbents wouldn’t wire them because they weren’t deemed profitable. The goal for the nation’s largest carriers was to have their cake and eat it too: they wouldn’t have to take on the high ROI of deploying into under-served areas, but they wouldn’t have to worry about competing with local projects if they someday decided they wanted to. Local citizen voting rights were irrelevant.

While we covered these efforts extensively, they weren’t really noticed on a national stage until Philadelphia’s citywide Wi-Fi project bumped into Pennsylvania’s law, a very public fight Verizon insisted changed the way they did things. Years earlier, carriers had managed to convince the state that no town or city should be allowed to deploy broadband without first getting Verizon’s ok. The law was actually generous in a sense — a dozen other States have passed similar laws that banned any community broadband project outright — for the people, of course.

Efforts on this front have slowed down, largely thanks to increased media coverage of broadband coverage gaps. However, incumbents are back again in Pennsylvania, with a new law that would more comprehensively ban community broadband. According to Hardold Feld, the push is popping up now because regional incumbents don’t want new stimulus money going to municipal competitors — something the bill would ban. Feld chimes in:

There’s more on the bill over at Muni-Wireless and the blog of Craig Settles.

The bill’s primary sponsor is State Senator Patrick Brown, though these bills are almost always largely co-written by the dominant incumbents in each state (in this case, Verizon and Comcast). Verizon insists to us they have nothing to do with this bill. “The bill sponsor, State Senator Pat Browne, has introduced this legislation for the past three sessions,” says Verizon spokesman Harry Mitchell. “Verizon has never stood in the way of a municipality that sought to provide broadband services in Pennsylvania nor will we,” claims Mitchell.
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