Sohn

A top counselor to Federal Communications Commission chairman Thomas Wheeler told a conference of city officials meeting in San Diego last week they should stop waiting around for the local phone or cable company to deliver the broadband service their communities need and build their own publicly owned broadband service instead.

Gigi Sohn was the keynote speaker at a luncheon held last week by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisers (NATOA), a major professional association representing individuals and organizations that manage telecom policies and services in local governments across the country.

“Without question, the landscape is changing for local governments,” she said, as reported by Multichannel News. “Most significantly, the future is not in cable, but in broadband,” adding: “Even the cable operators acknowledge this…Rather than wait for incumbent ISPs to build the network your cities want and need, you can take control of your own broadband futures.”

The FCC under the leadership of Thomas Wheeler has targeted anti-municipal broadband laws in the states of North Carolina and Tennessee for federal pre-emption, effectively invalidating laws ghost-written by telecommunications industry lobbyists working for the states’ dominant telecom companies — Time Warner Cable in North Carolina and AT&T and Comcast in Tennessee. The laws are designed to restrict or discourage municipal broadband competition.

Sohn previously promised municipal providers the FCC was ready to invalidate anti-municipal broadband laws in other states if they interfered with public broadband development. Sohn believes communities are unlikely to get cutting edge broadband from comfortable incumbent phone and cable companies. Local governments can and should step in to facilitate the kind of broadband services communities have begged those incumbents to offer for years.

Sohn was the president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a pro-consumer public interest group. She joined the FCC in November 2013.