Minnesota is making it easier for cities and towns to offer their own broadband services by eliminating two laws that put restrictions on the creation of municipal broadband networks.Minnesota was one of several states that imposed significant restrictions on municipal broadband, with that number varying depending on your definition of “significant,” Ars Technica reports. But this week, it struck down a century-old requirement that municipal telecommunications networks be approved in an election with 65% of the vote as well as a 2020 law that only let municipalities build their own networks if no private providers offered service or had plans to offer service “in the reasonably foreseeable future.””Though intended to regulate telephone service, the way the law had been interpreted after the invention of the internet was to lump broadband in with telephone service thereby imposing that super-majority threshold to the building of broadband networks,” the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Network says about the first law.According to the group, the new law changes the “telephone exchange” language to now say “any municipality shall have the right to own and operate a telephone exchange within its own borders.” The updated law also says any municipality “may construct such plant, or purchase an existing plant by agreement with the owner, or where it cannot agree with the owner on price, it may acquire an existing plant by condemnation.”
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There are now 16 states that restrict municipal broadband, the institute says. Legislators in Idaho, Montana, Missouri, Tennessee, Nebraska, and North Carolina introduced legislation in 2021 aimed to lessen the barriers in their states, but those bills all died in committee after the legislation was postponed indefinitely.
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