Gigi Sohn Announced as New Executive Director of the American Association for Public Broadband

HOUSTON, May 3, 2023 – President Joe Biden’s former Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn concluded her keynote remarks at the Broadband Communities Summit here with the announcement that she will be the first executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband.

“With money flowing from federal governments down to states and localities for public broadband to have a network that works for them,” Sohn said, “now is the perfect time“ to join the new association, whose founding was announced at the summit here last May.

Sohn said that public providers need to “have access to the same funding as private” ISPs.

In remarks at a press conference following the announcement, Sohn highlighted the need for public broadband advocates to find local community champions for broadband networks.

Such champions, Sohn said, need to say: “I want this, my community needs this, and we are going to figure out a way to have this.”

“We need to find those people,” she said of the state and local champions for broadband. “An awful lot of them are in conservative states.”

In announcing her new position in a fireside chat, Sohn talked about her 16 months after being designated a Federal Communications Commissioner by President Biden in November 2021, the trials of three congressional hearings, and her decision to withdraw her nomination from consideration in March 2023 after failing to secure the votes for Senate passage.

Sohn spoke in the luncheon keynote with Kim McKinley, chief marketing officer at UTOPIA Fiber, and Bob Knight, a local government official from Richfield, Connecticut.

Vocal advocate for public broadband

Sohn has been a vocal advocate of public broadband for years, and said that “there should be a level playing field” between public and private broadband. “This is about freedom for communities and their leaders to choose what kind of broadband their residents should have,” she said.

Sohn’s leadership of the association will focus on building this freedom for public broadband, she said.

She said that her number one priority will be to increase membership of AAPB, she said. The next priority will be to ensure that public broadband entities have access to federal funding coming down the pipeline on an equal basis to private companies.

The non-profit AAPB was founded by state and local broadband officials to build a diverse membership of public broadband networks nationwide and advocate for municipal broadband at all government levels.

“Until now, there has not been a membership-based advocacy organization that works to ensure that public broadband can grow unimpeded by anti-competitive barriers,” said Sohn. “We have the chance to make a positive case for states to fund and communities to choose public broadband and oppose barriers to local choice.”

Speaking of her 16 month ordeal, Sohn said it was “enormously frustrating” to not be able to talk about important issues during the process.