The Internet Is Broken. NYC Can Fix It.
New York City has an internet problem. Applying for a job. Helping your kid with homework. Scheduling a doctor’s appointment. For millions of New Yorkers, these seemingly straightforward tasks become impossible - or impossibly expensive thanks to the lack of broadband access.
Internet access in this city tracks race and class with brutal precision. Nearly 1 in 4 Bronx households lack broadband, almost double Manhattan’s rate. When federal subsidies ended in 2024, 44% of Bronx households lost their connection overnight.
ISPs build where it’s profitable, not where it’s needed. They lock in landlords, lock out competition, and charge New Yorkers up to $299/month for mediocre speeds. One-third of Black and Hispanic households have no broadband at all. This isn’t a market failure. It’s a policy choice and NYC can make a different one.
This isn’t just about streaming or scrolling. It’s about working class New Yorkers accessing their basic necessities like applying for jobs, filling out college applications, attending classes, scheduling doctor’s appointments, and applying for benefits. Digital exclusion deepens existing inequality.
Private ISPs have failed New York over and over
Verizon, Spectrum, and Optimum don’t compete. They carve up territory and charge whatever they want. The City sued Verizon for skipping underserved neighborhoods. The state fined Spectrum $174 million for lying about speeds. Altice was caught overcharging customers. They cut exclusive deals with landlords, block competing providers, and offer “customer service” that’s become a citywide punchline.
The 2020 Internet Master Plan was supposed to change this. The City had allocated $157 million, vetted contractors, and was in the early stages of deployment. Then the Adams administration killed it and replaced it with Big Apple Connect, a program that hands $38 million a year to the very same ISPs that created this crisis. Worse, Big Apple Connect secretly connected NYCHA security cameras to NYPD’s surveillance system, without telling residents, NYCHA, or City Council.
That’s what happens when the City treats the internet as a corporate subsidy instead of public infrastructure.
NYC already has an alternative in place, and it’s half the price.
The Housing Preservation Department (HPD) and the New York Public Library (NYPL) teamed together to launch Liberty Link in 2025 - the city’s first municipal broadband network. The network serves 2,200 households across 35 affordable housing buildings in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. The city owns the infrastructure and NYPL runs the network. The cost? $5-15 per household. In comparison, the Big Apple Connect program pays Spectrum and Altice $26 per household. Our tax dollars are being billed at twice the rate it would cost to connect New Yorkers through a municipal broadband network.
HPD requires free internet in all new affordable housing that the department finances. Over 20,000 units have 30-year service guarantees. Every new building becomes a hub for the neighborhood around it. This is part of the citywide infrastructure we already have.
There’s fiber running to 1,800+ schools, hundreds of libraries, and NYCHA buildings across all five boroughs. CityNet connects hundreds of city agencies. The City controls the underground conduit and can require new fiber whenever streets are opened. The infrastructure already exists.
Municipal broadband works. Public ownership of our broadband network allows our city to own the pipes and let providers compete on equal terms causing prices to drop and services to improve. That’s open-access: city-owned fiber, real competition, no more monopoly pricing. Towns across New York State and the country are reaping the benefits of municipal networks. Chattanooga, TN built a public network and received $2.69 billion in economic returns, 9,500 jobs, and a revitalized downtown. Jamestown, NY received $29.6 million in state ConnectALL funding and now offers gigabit service for $55 a month. NYC is eligible for this same state money. Internet for All is fighting to make it work in NYC, the world’s wealthiest city.
Internet for New Yorkers, built by New Yorkers.
We can’t wait for ISPs to do the right thing. We ask that the City act now to make our internet bills affordable and protect us from rising ISP costs in the long term. We demand the city take the following steps to get people online immediately and building a foundation for public ownership:
1. Get people online now.
Thousands of New Yorkers lost internet access overnight in 2025, when federal subsidies ended. A year has passed and many households are still offline. This is an emergency.
We demand that the city get the disconnected households online now. The city should distribute emergency hotspots and go door-to-door signing up offline households to New York State’s $15/month broadband plans. Too many New Yorkers don’t know these plans exist, and ISPs aren’t helping them enroll. We ask that the city scale up community-led networks like NYC Mesh to provide free or affordable service in neighborhoods that ISPs have abandoned, and partner with affordable housing developers to retrofit buildings with building-wide WiFi.
2. Hold ISPs accountable
ISPs are legally required to serve all neighborhoods and yet they don’t. Landlords are legally required to allow internet installation and yet they block it. We demand the city to enforce franchise agreements, conduct infrastructure audits to document what ISPs promised versus what they delivered, and impose daily fines for violations. Collected penalties should be reinvested into public broadband infrastructure.
Most importantly, we demand that the city sever the surveillance connections between Big Apple Connect and NYPD. No more using “digital equity” programs to spy on public housing residents.
3. Build public ownership
We demand the creation of a citywide broadband authority to coordinate deployment and enforce franchise agreements. Liberty Link proves the city can deliver better service at lower cost in places ISPs have neglected. This is a city run model that already works.
This authority can transition NYCHA buildings from Big Apple Connect’s surveillance internet to municipal service as capacity expands and use the savings to connect surrounding neighborhoods. They can also guide the adoption of “dig-once” rules so whenever the city opens a street in an underserved area, we lay fiber too.
We demand the city pursue New York State’s ConnectALL grants to accelerate public infrastructure deployment. Cities across New York State (Jamestown, Schoharie County, Orleans County) are building publicly-owned networks with state grants. NYC is eligible for the same funding but hasn’t applied.
A citywide broadband authority with the help of ConnectALL state grants can expand on the work of Liberty Link by establishing municipal ownership of fiber-based broadband, partnering with libraries and community organizations to operate networks, and providing free internet to all affordable housing developments. The authority can ensure that the expansion of internet infrastructure be built by union labor through CWA and IBEW, requiring that the workers who benefit from affordable internet are the ones building it.
4. Close the digital divide
Nearly 184,000 Bronx households lack a computer at home. Many New Yorkers have never used one. And for people with insecure housing or working across boroughs, phones are the primary way to get online.
We demand that the city expand access to technologies that provide New Yorkers with dignified access to connectivity. The city should expand the Laptop Lending Library and hotspot programs. They should allow students to keep school-issued devices year-round, not just during the academic year.
Internet access without intentional digital skillbuilding will only create a different kind of exclusion. We demand that the city fully fund digital literacy programs through libraries and community centers - not just at library branches, but in spaces where people already gather, in multiple languages, on schedules that work for working families. The city should fully fund teacher training in digital literacy through CUNY and scale proven workforce programs like Per Scholas and The Knowledge House.
INTERNET FOR ALL
We paid for corporate monopolies. What we got in return were expensive prices, poorer options and surveillance.
Internet for All is the alternative: public infrastructure, real accountability, and internet that serves New Yorkers.
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