Pssst ... Wanna Buy a Law?

Joey Durel likes to describe himself as a private-sector guy. Before he was elected mayor of Lafayette, La., in 2003, Durel, a Republican, ran a chain of pet stores and several restaurant franchises. He chaired the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce. Then, in his first months in office, he took what still seems to him a natural step: He agreed to have Lafayette’s municipal electric, water, and sewer utility run fiber-optic cable all the way to the city’s homes. It would compete with copper wire that Lafayette’s two commercial telecom outfits already had in place, but both had said Lafayette’s market—just over 60,000 people—was too small to justify fiber.

For private companies it has always been expensive to lay cable over mountains and across bayous, where there are often too few potential customers per square mile to make the effort worth it. Right where the suburbs disappear, the interests of telecommunications companies begin to diverge from those of residents and local politicians. Rural mayors know that to get the jobs President Barack Obama calls “insourcing,” they need not just adequate Internet capacity but the same capacity as their competitors, the metropolises. So small towns and isolated cities have started to do what their forebears did during the decades of electrification: They pay to run the wires themselves.