Last week, along with Net Neutrality, the FCC started to tackle some of the barriers that states have put up to make community-owned broadband networks more difficult. (It’s a move that President Obama encouraged earlier this year.) As the New Republic puts it, it may be the more important decision…

In a party-line 3-2 ruling, the FCC pre-empted state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that sought to prevent two community broadband networks from delivering high-quality, high-speed Internet access as a public utility. Overall, 19 states have laws banning or restricting community broadband, but the FCC’s ruling, if it survives court challenges, all but disintegrates them, allowing any municipality to offer a “public option” for broadband access. The ruling has major implications for promoting competition, increasing broadband speeds, and perhaps even making Internet access look more like electricity. …

If the order holds, it presents real promise for a city-by-city public option for broadband. Net neutrality ensures that the worst practices of telecom monopolies—charging for content to deliver across their pipes—won’t happen. But the public option, as Harvard law professor and former White House official Susan Crawford explained last April in an interview with Vox, could remove the monopoly itself, and the tendency among those corporate behemoths to deliver expensive, substandard service and leave many communities behind. “Just as we have a postal service that’s a public option for communications in the form of mail, we also need public options in every city for very high-capacity, very high-speed fiber internet access,” Crawford said.

Minnesota is one of the states that has a barrier – municipalities interested in offering broadband triple-play (voice, video, internet) are now required to hold a referendum to vote on whether they can provide telephone service to the community and the vote requires a super-majority(2/3 approval) to pass.

The St Cloud Times recently published an article that looks at the possible impact of changing the rules in St Cloud…

At a meeting last week, the Federal Communications Commission decided to pre-empt restrictive state laws on municipal broadband. That could lead to drastic changes for networks across the nation — the St. Cloud area included. …

Information Technology Director Micah Myers said the city of St. Cloud owns and operates about 90 miles of fiber-optic lines that connect the law enforcement center downtown, City Hall and all other government buildings except the airport, which connects to the Internet through T1 lines, a slower, older technology.

Myers said the fiber network, a “co-build with the school district” connects to St. Joseph and Clear Lake. About seven years ago, it prompted a discussion about providing competing Internet service in St. Cloud.

The city “never went anywhere” with the talks, but if more exploration would have occurred in St. Cloud, incumbent providers would have pushed back, Myers said. Entrenched cable television and telephone companies will “make your life a living hell,” he said.

The possibility is something cities should evaluate, said Chris Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, though “not every local government should do it.”

And in Annandale…

Kelly Hinnenkamp is the city administrator for Annandale, which unsuccessfully applied for funding as part of the Minnesota Border-to-Border Broadband Development Grant Program.

Hinnenkamp said the city has a “great need to move forward” with a city-owned, privately operated fiber network, something to which a transplanted business can attest. …

Frustrations prompted the city of Annandale to contract out a feasibility study and later launch a public request for proposals to find firms interested in managing a city-built fiber network.

Hinnenkamp said the city got legal advice indicating officials had authority to sell bonds to build a network. An upcoming meeting with DEED and other planning will determine if the project will advance.

The article goes on to describe several public-private partnerships that are also making a difference in the area.