The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband

Re:The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits ... by hyperrail on Thursday April 15, 2021 @10:42PM (#26828782)

City governments have already been able to provide and sell Internet service - it is PUDs* that are banned from selling until and unless this bill is signed. And not only is the ban only on retail as opposed to wholesale service, there is also already a slight and temporary relaxation of the ban for coastal regions west of the Seattle area. [1]

Since you're also a Seattle-area local, you might remember that Seattle tried to do a public-private partnership with a company called Gigabit Squared to run fiber into Seattleites' homes. That initiative failed in 2014 [2], but the Seattle City Council has always been able to reconsider, with or without this bill.

* Public Utility Districts are special-purpose governments in Washington dedicated to being non-profit electric or water utilities, with limited tax powers (.045% property tax per year). Many counties have county-wide PUDs that are independent of the county government, such as Snohomish County PUD (Seattle's northern suburbs; no broadband offering) and Chelan County PUD (central Cascade mountains like Wenatchee and Leavenworth; does offer wholesale broadband).

[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=54.16.420

[2] https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2014/01/s...

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Re:The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits ... by dahfizz on Friday April 16, 2021 @09:20AM (#26833522)

I am curious: who operates the "publicly owned" networks?

I think having having the government lay fiber while they are already doing work on the electric infrastructure is an obvious thing to do. But I would be extremely hesitant if the government is the one who owns and runs all the networking equipment (routers, switches, firewalls, etc).

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