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“Dark money” groups help private ISPs lobby against municipal broadband

"Social welfare" groups spread industry talking points against public broadband.

"It's just very easy to set up these 501(c)(4)s where you don't have to reveal the donors," Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), told Ars. When Sohn's nomination stalled in the Senate last year, she said that cable lobbyists and dark money groups had distorted her record and in effect were allowed to "choose their regulators." The dark money campaign that tried to tarnish UTOPIA's image, Mitchell suspects, "is about finding messages that will resonate that these big cable and telephone companies could use in other states."

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