[News] The Divide: Gigi Sohn on how to defeat opponents of public broadband

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In this episode, we talk with Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), a membership organization that advocates for community-owned broadband networks.

She returns to the podcast to discuss a recent effort by the community of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, to construct and launch a town-owned fiber network, until the project was defeated with a town vote last month 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.

Dark money vs. Munis

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, Utah, for example, which overcame its own battle against the Utah Taxpayers Association (UTA), another organization with ties to the cable industry.

In today's episode, we discuss some takeaways about where and why these dark money tactics to oppose public broadband networks have succeeded and failed, and why getting grassroots buy-in from the get-go is essential.

"In Bountiful, it was a grassroots campaign that convinced the town council to vote on a five-to-zero basis to own their own infrastructure. So, it came from the ground up," says Sohn.

Without that grassroots support from the start, organizations like Mass Priorities and their backers have an easier time generating a groundswell of opposition. "Comcast is famous for bringing people, and sometimes paying them, to come to meetings," says Sohn.

In addition to enlisting the public's support, this is also an area where Sohn's organization, AAPB, can help. In Bountiful, she says, AAPB was "brought in early" and thus had time to strategize to defeat the UTA opposition campaign.

"We had a bunch of ads. I had an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune that was seen all over the state, and frankly, all over the country. And as a result, we were able to defeat it," she says of the Bountiful network, which officially launched last year with Utopia Fiber as its operator.

A bit on BEAD

We also touch on the state of BEAD and what role public broadband networks may be able to play in filling gaps left behind by the federal program, which has seen its deployment funding slashed by the Trump administration's "benefit of the bargain" rules, and which is already seeing some service providers decline to sign their grant agreements. 

Then of course there's that remaining $21 billion in "non-deployment" funds that the NTIA was supposed to issue guidance on months ago...

Sohn directs her disappointment about BEAD both at the Biden administration for failing to get BEAD funding out to the states during their time in office, and the Trump administration for then revising the program's rules "to basically focus on who can bid the lowest," she says, and therefore relegating much of the program's locations and funding to satellite.

Notably, of the two low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers that have won BEAD funding to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, SpaceX has already sought to relieve itself from BEAD program rules that it calls "untenable" for LEO providers; and Amazon Leo, which has yet to launch commercial service, appears to have declined its awards in Nebraska so far.

"All I know is, Congress intended this $42 billion to close the digital divide, and that's not going to happen with what's going on right now," says Sohn.

Listen to the full episode here.