It astonishes me how hard the City of Bellingham (COB) works to NOT improve infrastructure that would make our city safer, more economically viable, and more equitable for its citizens. Last year, they literally ran an entire ad campaign to mislead you into thinking they’re working on our critical infrastructure. Beyond sometimes responding to the occasional catastrophic failure, they’re not. But they have been busy.

I first noticed how busy while looking at the city’s Google Search results. With the loss of net-neutrality during the first Trump term, providers were legally allowed to prioritize network traffic any way they saw fit for any reason. If you didn’t like an advocate’s stance on public fiber, no problem, just ask your buddies at Google to knock those articles lower in your search results. Generally, search engine providers, like Google, do this based on how much money an entity provides their organization. They can also simply prioritize traffic because it is in their best interest. And remember, Google is a search engine AND ALSO an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in large parts of the country. Here is a complete list of all of Google’s products and services.

While looking at the city and its relationship with Google, I came across a notice that Google, according to its own AI, “provides qualifying nonprofits with up to $120,000 per year (or $10,000 per month) in free, in-kind search advertising credits.” Well, naturally I was curious, because Google’s search engine always prioritizes the COB’s fictitious story about fiber availability, then the Ports’ story, then the PUD story, and always in that order. Sometimes, the stories of big telecom providers are first, but those big money interests are always within the first five hits.***

How is their story fictitious? The big telecom representative studded Broadband Advisory Group (BAG) did do one thing right, they recommended that the COB upgrade their existing network to a carrier class network. But years after the BAGs’ final meeting the network remains about the same as it was decades ago, there has been no progress on upgrading it, public works still stonewalls all questions related to it, and the city council and public works went out of their way to block open access leasing of the network like they provide in the neighboring city of Mount Vernon on their public fiber network. Yet, the COB pretends like you are getting real value out of their lack of work and lack of improvement on this network when they haven’t even upgraded it to make sure our critical services will work during a crisis. 

So how does this ad campaign tie in with the COB being dishonest? After recognizing this trend, and having watched the en-shittification of the internet closely since the loss of net-neutrality, I got the sense that the COB, other governmental entities, and their good corporate friends, may be prioritizing their data via Google ads and other search engine prioritization services. I was able to confirm that this is, in fact, the case via several public records requests with the COB. I found that until February of this year, they were running a Google Ads campaign that boosted search results to all cob.orgsites including their pages on fiber and the Broadband Advisory Group (BAG). We should bear in mind that this prioritization would apply to their version of any story, like the joke that is advertised as our “vibrant downtown” which shows the signs of extreme poverty and government led inhumanity at every turn and so on. 

On those fiber pages, they admit to having a vast network, then tell you that city residents can’t use it. The big-telecom-biased BAG itself recommended the city upgrade that fiber network to a carrier class, particularly because it carries our most critical data. Unfortunately, it has yet to be significantly improved. 

Ultimately, COB’s fiber page refers you to the Port’s Open Access network, which is absurd as a public fiber “solution” because it has virtually no coverage. This is also true of the few pretend fiber solutions we get from other providers in the area. The truth is, we are still way behind any real, symmetrical, gigabit standard and most of Bellingham still has garbage internet service that is overpriced…if they have functional internet service at all. Remember, while many are “hooked up” their speeds are still so poor that they are functionally off-line, especially when compared to public fiber networks in the rest of the developed world and many “solutions” are simply too expensive for many to afford. Especially when we look at the price per Mbit of these services. Starlink, for example, is a total joke when it comes to serving the poor.    

The astonishing thing is the level of deception the COB is willing to engage in to protect their corporate friends. But the big telecom club they are in is huge, and it’s lucrative, and we are forking over a fortune to support it. Unfortunately, at the same time, they are just sitting on the public fiber network that they admit is robust, and covers the entire city, and we have already paid for it. At the end of the day improving all services comes down to access to affordable, high-quality fiber, especially extension of fiber like all wireless and satellite services. In short, we all still need real fiber to the home services county-wide that meet a symmetrical Gigabit standard under a proper load test like the RRUL test.

***Some experts are now recommending that you, “Go beyond the first page of Google search results. Since, more and more content is being intentionally search-engine-optimized.” In other words, what you actually searched for is often not in the first several hits. Here are a few strategiesfor getting real content out of modern search engines in a world where content can be prioritized by big money interests with the help of AI.