Post
The New Deal was a mere blip in the American project, but a century later, America's poorest, worst-served people are still reaping its benefits, with *far* faster, cheaper connections than you can get from the big telcos that have sewn up New York City and Los Angeles. And in some of those places, the public ISP doesn't just shower their subscribers with fast data - they shower them with *millions of dollars*.
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What's more, there'd be a *ton* more of them but for the brutal ministration of ALEC, the far-right, dark money policy shop that convinced multiple state governments to ban community broadband, *even in places where there was no commercial broadband service*:
https://actions.eko.org/a/att-alec-lobby-community-owned-internet-networks
One of the great predictors of whether your town will get fast, affordable, future-proof fiber is its history.
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Many of today's municipal broadband co-ops are descended from rural *telephone* co-ops, and those telephone co-ops were birthed by the New Deal's rural *electrification* co-ops. This is the incredibly long shadow that good public spending casts - a *century* of successful provision of amenities that substantially improve the quality of life of whole *regions*.
Take Jackson and Owlsley Counties, rural Kentucky counties in Appalachia, some of America's poorest places.
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Starting in 2009, the local telephone company, the Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative, started pulling fiber to every home in both counties. To get that fiber over rugged mountain passes, they pulled it on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub." Soon, every subscriber had access to symmetrical fiber broadband at speeds of up to 10gb/s, and the region found itself at the center of an economic revival:
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The Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative was founded in 1953, as an extension of the town's electrification co-op, itself founded in the 1930s after the passage of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 (the REA was amended in 1949, allowing electrification co-ops to secure low-cost loans for telephone rollouts).
You don't need to live in rural Appalachia to reap the benefit of publicly backed broadband co-ops.
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In Minnesota's Beltrami County (pop 46,288; density 18.6 people/square mile, median income $33,392/household), the local co-op Paul Bunyan Communications offers symmetrical fiber at speeds up to 10gb/s. But that's just table-stakes: Paul Bunyan doesn't just offer reasonably priced, reliable, *screamingly fast* broadband - it also pays its members whenever too much cash builds up in its bank account.
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Paul Bunyan just paid out *$3.6 million* in refunds to its subscribers:
The payouts are pro-rated based on how much you spend on broadband. Customers who were due $150 or less got a credit on their next bill, while customers owed more than $150 got a check in the mail.
Nice, huh? It gets nicer: in 2018, Paul Bunyan paid back its subscribers $2.2 million; in 2022, they paid back $6.3 million, and last year they paid back $3 million.
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