Colorado Voters Shoot Down State's Awful Broadband Law

Colorado is one of more than twenty states where incumbent broadband ISPs have purchased state protectionist laws prohibiting towns and cities from getting into the broadband business. This week state residents voted overwhelmingly to put the law out to pasture. While SB 152 technically still exists, local towns, one at a time, had the chance to exempt themselves from its provisions.

And in most areas the vote wasn't even close, with 83%-93% of voters in favor of letting their towns and cities make their own decisions impacting local infrastructure.

As we've long noted towns and cities wouldn't even be considering getting into the broadband business if they were happy with incumbent broadband service.

But instead of offering a better product and competing, ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, CenturyLink and Time Warner Cable effectively paid state legislatures to pass restrictions on what towns and cities can and can't do with their own taxpayer funds. The measures were historically portrayed as attempts to protect citizens from fiscal irresponsibility, but they were by and large about one thing: keeping the stagnant broadband status quo (and campaign contributions) intact.

For years these laws were passed with nary a notice by the press and public. But Google Fiber's entrance into the market in 2013 helped place a renewed focus on the pure protectionism of these bills and the dysfunctional regulatory capture inherent in the US Broadband market. It also placed a spotlight on the fact that in many areas, there will simply be no broadband upgrades without public/private partnerships.

quote: This year, results were similar as the majority of voters supported local measures with over 70 percentage of ballots cast. In Durango, over 90 percent of voters chose to opt out of restrictive SB 152; Telluride voters affirmed their commitment to local authority when over 93 percent of votes supported measure 2B. Many communities showed support in the mid- and upper- 80th percentile.

Major Colorado markets had already voted in recent years to ignore the anti-competitive state restriction. Yesterday smaller communities also overwhelmingly made it clear that they, not mega-ISP executives, should be the ones making local infrastructure decisions Colorado's vote marks a notable retreat for these state laws. The FCC is also finally working to eliminate similar laws in both Tennessee and North Carolina , and public sentiment is finally tilting toward the reality that to shore up the country's broadband gaps, local communities are going to be playing a leading role.