Located halfway between the state capital of Columbia and the port city of Charleston, Orangeburg County, South Carolina is among the more geographically blessed areas of the country. It’s also one of its poorest. Over a quarter of its population lives below the poverty line, with a per capita income of $17,579. And this is poverty of a particularly stubborn sort. At least twenty percent of Orangeburg’s population has toiled in poverty over the past thirty years, entrenching it on the USDA’s list of counties mired in “persistent poverty.”

In an effort to improve the area’s economic prospects, county officials have worked in recent years to secure funding to refurbish roadways and sewer systems—but they also know that, in a globalized marketplace, old-school infrastructure is not nearly enough. That’s why, in 2009, Orangeburg County applied for, and received, $18.65 million in stimulus money to finally give the area access to high-speed broadband internet. County Administrator Bill Clark and his colleagues envisioned a municipal, or muni, network that could reach roughly a quarter of Orangeburg’s rural population, including just over three thousand households and one hundred businesses. Such networks are thought to be a good option for vast, sparsely populated rural areas because laying cable across them is a costly proposition, one that’s hard for private companies to justify without a greater guaranteed return than such areas can typically provide. When cities, counties, or public utilities own and operate the networks instead, however, they can provide low-cost, high-quality access to the Internet to their residents. Localities can finance them through a number of avenues, including public-private partnerships or bonds.

But the titans of telecom aren’t operating on quite the same wavelength. Since last January, AT&T, CenturyLink, and Time Warner have contributed just over $146,000 to politicians in South Carolina who back legislation that would cripple networks like Orangeburg’s. It’s only one example of a broader campaign by telecom companies to protect their cartel at all costs—even at the expense of keeping the country’s poorest on the wrong side of the digital divide for many years to come.

CORPORATE RESISTANCE to publicly-owned internet networks dates back to the fabled days of dial-up. In 1995, companies lobbied successfully for Texas to enact a law barring municipal entities from providing certain telecommunications services. In response, a number of national organizations lobbied Congress to include a provision in the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996 that would pre-empt states from enacting laws that would bar “any entity” from providing telecommunications services. But in 2004 the Supreme Court ruled in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League that that pre-emption was too broad (more on the decision here). If Congress wanted to restrict states from exercising traditional state powers—including instructing municipalities on what services they could provide—it had to say so explicitly, the Court decided.

Since then, nearly half the states have enacted barriers to public communications initiatives. The first such laws were “flat-out, in-your-face” bans—outlawing municipal networks outright. But more recently, telecoms began pressing for state-level laws to establish a “level playing field”—a wireless market that doesn’t pit private companies against public providers. These laws typically impose onerous regulations on public networks that invite costly litigation and frequently lead to delays and cost overruns.