A couple of months ago, I interviewed a woman in public housing in the small town of Wilson, North Carolina. She told me that the best thing that ever happened to her family was getting internet access over the city's municipal fiber network. Included in her monthly rent bill is a $10 fee for 50 Mbps symmetric access (equal uploads and downloads). Why is this so wonderful? Because her sons are getting better grades, now that they don't have to go to the library to use the internet.

Sadly, New York City is far behind Wilson, NC when it comes to ensuring ubiquitous, reasonably priced fiber optic internet access for every resident. As far as anyone can tell, the digital divide in the city is stunning: A September 2015 audit by City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office found that more than a quarter of city households lacked “broadband” internet access (defined as any wired connection other than dial-up, meaning that monthly subscriptions to totally antiquated DSL connections over copper lines qualified). Neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn were least likely to have signed up for internet access.

Susan Crawford is a columnist for Backchannel and a professor at Harvard Law School. She is also the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

We know that the primary reason people don’t sign up is price. This point keeps coming home to me as I interview people from all walks of life in the scrappy cities across the country that are doing something about a ubiquitous upgrade to inexpensive fiber connections. People really want and need this connectivity.

Yet in our flagship city, prices for second-rate (non-fiber) access are artificially sky-high and out of reach for many families. And what’s so remarkable is that the city actually does have the regulatory authority to do something about inadequate competitive fiber access in Manhattan and the Bronx.

Yes, folks: New York City is the regulator of all the underground conduit in those two boroughs — meaning the pipes running under the streets through which fiber optic lines are threaded. At any moment, it could require that additional conduit be built where it doesn’t now exist. It could require that choked-up conduit that is now decades old be cleaned and repaired. And it could require that that conduit run to every building in the city, and require that all new buildings have neutral connection points in their basements allowing many competitors to hawk their services to tenants.

If the city took these steps — which, by the way, are now being contemplated by San Francisco, so perhaps peer pressure will nudge things along — it would foster a vibrantly competitive marketplace for retail fiber-based services for everyone. Dozens of competitors. Low prices for data transmission.

But the problem is that, as far as I can tell, the city that never sleeps is, in fact, asleep: It is not taking advantage of its powers.

That is why I sued the city five years ago seeking information about its regulatory efforts.

Here is some good news: A state court in New York recently agreed with me that information about what the city is up to as a regulator, particularly in underserved areas, should be made public. Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum), AT&T, and Verizon don’t want that information to come to light. But citizens of New York should.

Weirdly, this story of modern-day internet access begins 126 years ago. Following the Great Blizzard of 1891, during which the tangled lines of the city’s many private telephone companies fell and caused communications chaos, the city muscled all the communications utilities into cooperation and forced them to bury their lines.

A single entity, called Empire City Subway, was formed to build, maintain, and expand conduit under the streets of Manhattan and the Bronx. (The word "subway" here refers to underground spaces or paths, not trains.) Under an 1891 contract with the city, which has never been amended, ECS was given the exclusive franchise to do this job.

After decades of consolidation — surprise! — ECS is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Verizon. Yes, ECS still has a contract with the city under which the city can order and direct the building and maintenance of conduit, including conduit it needs for its own purposes. The city can require that conduit be expanded. But Verizon answers the phone. Tricky.