The City of Chattanooga (TN) has achieved what many cities lack these days — a vibrant downtown. They did so because they offer broadband to all their customers. They started this experiment in 2010, and it was wildly successful — businesses are locating there in droves.
In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the United States to be wired by a municipality for 1 gigabit per second fiber optic Internet. Five years later, the city began offering 10 gigabit per second Internet (for comparison, Time Warner Cable’s internet maxes out at 300 megabits per second). That has attracted dozens of tech firms to the city that take advantage of the fast connections for things like telehealth app development and 3D printing, and it’s given downtown Chattanooga a vibrancy rare in an age when small city centers have been emptied out by deindustrialization and the suburbs.
In so doing, they were able to reverse their decline and bring people in. This success story is an object lesson in how to resurrect cities and towns across the country — be able to offer something that nobody else in the surrounding area has. We can’t wait for a big corporation to decide to locate, and we can’t wait for a friendly state government to come to power. Reviving a local economy requires commitment.
Where I live, we are spoiled; we have a local phone company that serves the region with high-speed internet and one nearby town offers internet as well in partnership with a local tech company. Both companies provide excellent personal service. In contrast, many of the huge multinational corporations provide poor service; they take your money and they don’t respond when there is a problem with your service.
Putting this country back to work does not involve the kind of sloganeering that Donald Trump uses. It involves public servants willing to do the hard work of rebuilding our infrastructure. And we must do more; we need to bring broadband to every part of the country like we did electricity in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Rural electrification (as noted by George Will, quoted in one of Al Franken’s books) was one of the biggest transformational programs this country has ever had. And rural broadband will transform this country for the 21st century.
And protecting and expanding our open Internet is just one more reason why we need to elect Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton will appoint FCC commissioners who will protect Net Neutrality. Donald Trump will appoint FCC commissioners who will trash it and give the Internet over to the corporations, who will jack up rates and limit access. Hillary Clinton will continue President Obama’s plans of developing our infrastructure, including bringing in 5G networks. Donald Trump would do absolutely nothing and offers no plans whatsoever. Here are their plans:
Hillary Clinton has indicated support for net neutrality. She gave two thumbs up to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal for strong net neutrality rules, though admitted it was only a “foot in the door.” Clinton has expressed concern that regulations could mean stagnant competition among service providers, saying “we’ve got to do more about how we incentivize competition in broadband.” And she’s committed to fighting broadband monopolies, citing Google Fiber in Kansas City as a perfect example of what she wants to see everywhere in the US.
Clinton’s $275 billion infrastructure proposal, which some have called “modest,” includes a section on developing US broadband infrastructure, though no specific budget is mentioned. She’s also promised to continue Obama’s progress on bringing 5G networks to the US, but those networks wouldn’t realistically be widely adopted until the end of her (theoretical) first term.
Donald Trump does not support net neutrality. Actually, he thinks it will lead to the censorship of conservative media. “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media,” he tweeted in 2014.
The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC policy that began in the 1940s and ended in 1987. The Washington Post has a good summary of what it was all about:
The Fairness Doctrine [...] required that TV and radio stations holding FCC-issued broadcast licenses to (a) devote some of their programming to controversial issues of public importance and (b) allow the airing of opposing views on those issues. This meant that programs on politics were required to include opposing opinions on the topic under discussion. Broadcasters had an active duty to determine the spectrum of views on a given issue and include those people best suited to representing those views in their programming.
So Trump was suggesting that net neutrality regulations would lead to censorship of online media that doesn’t include opposing opinions. That’s a ridiculous suggestion, since the net neutrality regulations had nothing to do with the content of the internet.
Gary Johnson opposes Net Neutrality and supports an Internet Sales Tax on Internet businesses.
Jill Stein supports Net Neutrality. She would make public airwaves free for public purpose, which she says would get big money out of politics.
But ultimately, we need to have a system of public funding, and the way that can be affordable is by making the public airwaves free for public purpose. The minute you do that, the bottom falls out of campaign funding. It's no longer needed, and they can raise all the money in the world that they want, but they don't have an advantage for it. We could solve this problem in a heartbeat, but you can't solve it unless you also democratize the airwaves and make them a tool for democracy and for educating the public about things that matter, like elections. The minute you do that, the funding campaigns go away. It's totally within arm's reach.