Many tenants pay too much money to their ISP and have no alternatives.

We can bring choice and lower prices to our own apartments and to tenants throughout Oakland. The Oakland Internet Choice Coalition (OICC) is supporting a communications choice ordinance from council member Noel Gallo to provide a legal path requiring landlords of multi-tenant buildings to allow any qualified Internet service provider to serve their tenants.

You can sign on and tell your council members to support ISP choice and lower prices for broadband in Oakland.

Across Oakland (and the rest of the country) landlords are acting as the sole decider of the choice of ISP. This reduces flexibility to choose providers that charge less money or offer better service, like higher speeds or a commitment to net neutrality and to user privacy.

Additionally, many landlords arrange exclusive revenue sharing agreements, in which a big provider raises prices on the service, then pays a portion of that profit back to the landlord as a form of double rent. This burden, which is a primary cause of the digital divide, is felt extra heavily in the areas of Oakland with large numbers of residents of color, immigrants, and poor folks.

We know that the giant incumbent ISPs, and the corporate managers of large apartment buildings and REITs across the country, are eager to see ISP payola continue as a way of making a good “return on investment.” They believe that the people who live in their properties should be mainly sources of profit in various forms for their shareholders. They tried to squash an Internet choice rule in San Francisco via the FCC over the summer – that is how afraid they are of breaking open the ISP market to competition in their buildings.

You can help win the fight against their usurious monopoly practices – support the Oakland Internet Choice ordinance and email the council to offer internet choice in Oakland and spread this good idea all over the region and the country.

Join us. Oakland Internet Choice Coalition partners: Color of Change, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Greenlining Institute, Media Alliance, MediaJustice, MonkeyBrains, Oakland Tenants Union, Open Fiber, People's Open Network, Sonic, The Utility Ratepayers Network (TURN)