In North Carolina, some residents still have to fight for internet access. “This is critical infrastructure like the highways that we drive on,” one city official says.
ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. — Across the well-manicured homes in this city’s subdivision of Fairfield, Jeff Stanovich never thought that he would be hunched over his router wishing his internet would work.
Michelle Galloway was one of those teachers who needed to be connected. Her house, surrounded by wheat fields on a road that is mostly trafficked by combines and tractors, is not wired for broadband. Suddenly teaching remotely for the first time, she sometimes had to teach via chat because the video and audio just wouldn’t work.
“This is critical infrastructure like the highways that we drive on,” said Goings. “We can all agree that people need water to drink, whether it's profitable or not.”While the Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan aims to fix this with a goal of providing coverage to every household, prioritizing smaller groups like Greenlight, that doesn’t help in North Carolina.
As the city of Wilson pressed ahead with building out Greenlight, Time Warner Cable, along with the North Carolina Telecommunication Association, an industry lobby group, lobbied the North Carolina General Assembly for a state bill to make it nearly impossible for a city to run its own internet service.NBC News
Then, in 2011, both chambers of the North Carolina General Assembly were won by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction. The bill passed and was signed into law. From 2002 to 2004, the bill was adopted in varying forms in 18 states across the country, creating barriers to municipal broadband in each, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington-based nonprofit group. North Carolina was the 19th and final state to restrict municipal broadband in 2011.
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