“Dark money” groups help private ISPs lobby against municipal broadband

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Cities and towns that build their own broadband networks often say they only considered the do-it-yourself option because private Internet service providers didn't meet their communities' needs.

When a cable or phone company's Internet service is too slow, too expensive, not deployed widely enough, or all of the above, local government officials sometimes decide to take matters into their own hands.

"It's just very easy to set up these 501(c)(4)s where you don't have to reveal the donors," Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), told Ars.

When Sohn's nomination stalled in the Senate last year, she said that cable lobbyists and dark money groups had distorted her record and in effect were allowed to "choose their regulators."

The dark money campaign that tried to tarnish UTOPIA's image, Mitchell suspects, "is about finding messages that will resonate that these big cable and telephone companies could use in other states."

One example came in 2017 when voters in Fort Collins, Colorado, approved a city broadband network despite a lobbying campaign funded by business and trade groups that Comcast belonged to.

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