American politicians of every stripe have long bemoaned the lack of high speed internet access across the country. Despite being the center of technological innovation for the past 60 years, average internet speeds in the United States lag behind those in South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and a host of European Union countries. Outside of big cities, high-speed internet access is often unavailable, which slows economic development and affects education.

There are a few reasons for this. The first is that the U.S. is a very big country, and large swaths of it are sparsely populated, making it inefficient to connect small, rural communities to high-speed networks. The telecommunication industry, meanwhile, is highly concentrated—many areas only have one internet service provider—meaning that companies are not competing for customers in ways that push them to expand their networks. These companies have not, moreover, been incentivized by the federal government to expand their networks.



Former President Barack Obama pushed philanthropists to tackle the problem late in his second term and proposed a broadband subsidy for poor households. Hillary Clinton pledged to “connect every household in America to broadband by the year 2020,” via public-private partnerships. And earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that ostensibly aimed to make it easier for internet companies to connect rural communities, but didn’t actually accomplish much of anything.



But the best solution isn’t philanthropy or public-private partnerships—it’s what effectively amounts to a public option for the internet. And Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for governor of Michigan, just laid out an ambitious program that could serve as a model for states across the country.



In a policy proposal announced on Monday evening, El-Sayed’s campaign laid out what effectively amounts to a public-public partnership, called “MI-Fi.” The state would provide cities and municipalities with funding to share the cost of constructing their own high-speed broadband networks. These networks would then be run by the cities themselves—in some cases, in competition with private companies. Governments would charge users a fee to access the service, either by providing their own retail service or by outsourcing to a state-run internet service provider that would assist communities unable to handle their own service.

