Nearly half of Americans do not have an internet connection that meets minimum broadband speeds. Moreover, a staggering number of poor people of color do not have home internet access of any kind. And, across the board, Americans are charged some of the highest prices for internet service in the developed world. These are all symptoms of a much larger, structural problem: the corporate capture of the pipes, wires, and other infrastructure that powers the internet.

Over the last two decades, progressive media reformers have often pursued an accommodationist agenda, attempting to reconcile the public’s interest in universal, high-quality broadband with the profit interests of large internet service providers (ISPs). They sought to rein in the malfeasance of corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T while leaving their ownership and control of the country’s internet infrastructure intact. Their animating question was how to tame the telecom giants, not how to slay them.

However, as the fog of neoliberalism begins to lift and the horizons of political possibility extend forward, we should not be satisfied with dithering at the edges of the vast empires of cable and telecom monopolies. This requires not just rearguard critique of the existing communications order, but an affirmative vision of what a more democratic communication system that operates outside of the market would like.