This is a story that defies two strongly held beliefs. The first—embraced fervently by today's FCC—is that the private marketplace is delivering world-class internet access infrastructure at low prices to all Americans, particularly in urban areas. The second is that cities are so busy competing that they are incapable of cooperating with one another, particularly when they have little in common save proximity.

These two beliefs aren’t necessarily true. Right now, the 16 very different cities that make up the South Bay region of Southern California have gotten fed up with their internet access situation: They’re paying too much for too little. So they are working together to collectively lower the amounts they pay for city communications by at least a third. It's the first step along a path that, ultimately, will bring far cheaper internet access services to the 1.1 million people who live in the region.

Susan Crawford (@scrawford) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a professor at Harvard Law School, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

You might think this is impossible. It’s true that many city officials have argued that regional collaborations are resource-intensive and bound to fail. That's the case in the Boston area, where a city official in Malden (7 miles from Boston City Hall) bluntly told researchers, "I couldn't support regional government at all. Each community has its own unique set of circumstances and facts and issues."

The South Bay partnership suggests a promising alternative: Maybe cities can cooperate and save money without compromising their local autonomy. At this same moment, though, the FCC is on a march to smother local authority by blocking states from regulating any aspect of broadband service, supporting states that have raised barriers to municipal networks, deregulating pricing for lines running between cities, and removing local control over rights-of-way that could be used to bring cheaper access into town.

The writing is on the wall: the FCC would like to bar other regions from acting in just this kind of sensible way.

The South Bay is a huge, wildly diverse region, ranging from mostly-white-and-rich Rancho Palos Verdes in the south, where at least three-quarters of adults have a college degree, to mostly-African-American-and-not-rich Inglewood to the north, where only 17 percent of adults have that degree. The beach towns of Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach, with their low-slung, raffish apartment houses and innumerable surfboards, are in the middle. This densely populated area is facing a hollowing of its middle class, at the same time that its population is skewing older. Like many regions in the US, it needs to attract new businesses and residents, get its people into more modern jobs, and lower residents’ commute times.

South Bay Cities Council of Governments

But the region's data failings are getting in its way. In general, businesses and residents in the South Bay have either low-cost but low-speed or high-speed but high-cost options for data transmission. The choices of alternative providers aren't great, and there aren't inexpensive fiber options.

The situation for the cities themselves is truly awful: About a third of city buildings in the 16 South Bay cities have to rely on slow DSL internet access. Only two of the cities have fiber-optic connections between buildings. "They're paying too much, and they're getting very little," says Jory Wolf, a former CIO of the City of Santa Monica who now acts as a consultant to cities and regions and led the South Bay project.

Earlier this year, the South Bay Cities Council of Governments decided that addressing the region's internet access problems, starting with city buildings and moving out from there to businesses, was a shared economic development priority. The SBCCOG asked for bids for a regional fiber-optic loop that would connect all the city halls in the region to one another as well as to two major internet points of presence (POPs). Having all the cities' traffic aggregated together would give the region bargaining power and potentially wholesale prices through those redundant POPs. (Having redundant POPs is also important; you want to make sure that no one provider can hold your traffic ransom when it's on its way out of town.)