Internet For All:
Our Demands
Internet for New Yorkers, built by New Yorkers.
We can’t wait for ISPs to do the right thing. We ask that the city act now to restrain our rising internet bills and build the infrastructure for an affordable internet.
1. Get people online now.
Thousands of New Yorkers lost internet access overnight in 2025, when federal subsidies ended. A year has passed and many households are still offline. This is an emergency.
We demand that the city get the disconnected households online now. The city should distribute emergency hotspots and go door-to-door signing up offline households to New York State’s $15/month broadband plans. Too many New Yorkers don’t know these plans exist, and ISPs aren’t helping them enroll. We ask that the city scale up community-led networks like NYC Mesh to provide free or affordable service in neighborhoods that ISPs have abandoned, and partner with affordable housing developers to retrofit buildings with building-wide WiFi.
2. Hold ISPs accountable.
ISPs are legally required to serve all neighborhoods and yet they don’t. Landlords are legally required to allow internet installation and yet they block it. We demand the city to enforce franchise agreements, conduct infrastructure audits to document what ISPs promised versus what they delivered, and impose daily fines for violations. Collected penalties should be reinvested into public broadband infrastructure.
3. Build public ownership.
We demand the creation of a citywide broadband authority. Neighborhood Internet – NYC’s first municipal broadband network serves 2,200 affordable housing units and demonstrates that public ownership is viable. This is a city run model that already works.
But how do we pay for it? We already are and we’re being overcharged. NYC’s Big Apple Connect program pays $26 per household with our tax dollars. Neighborhood Internet would cost us less than half: $5-15 per household. That’s $38 million a year going to corporate profits instead of public infrastructure. By redirecting that money, the city could connect far more New Yorkers while building assets we actually own.
We demand the city pursue New York State’s ConnectALL grants to accelerate public infrastructure deployment. Cities across New York State (Jamestown, Schoharie County, Orleans County) are building publicly-owned networks with state grants. NYC is eligible for the same funding but hasn’t applied.
A citywide broadband authority with the help of ConnectALL state grants can expand on the work of Neighborhood Internet by establishing municipal ownership of fiber-based broadband, partnering with libraries and community organizations to operate networks, and providing free internet to all affordable housing developments. The authority can ensure that the expansion of internet infrastructure be built by union labor through CWA and IBEW, requiring that the workers who benefit from affordable internet are the ones building it.
4. Close the digital divide.
Nearly 184,000 Bronx households lack a computer at home. Many New Yorkers have never used one. And for people with insecure housing or working across boroughs, phones are the primary way to get online.
We demand that the city expand access to technologies that provide New Yorkers with dignified access to connectivity. The city should expand the Laptop Lending Library and hotspot programs. They should allow students to keep school-issued devices year-round, not just during the academic year.
Internet access without intentional digital skillbuilding will only create a different kind of exclusion. We demand that the city fully fund digital literacy programs through libraries and community centers – not just at library branches, but in spaces where people already gather, in multiple languages, on schedules that work for working families. The city should fully fund teacher training in digital literacy through CUNY and scale proven workforce programs like Per Scholas and The Knowledge House.
New Yorkers across all boroughs have a right to transparent & affordable pricing, more ISP options, and faster internet speeds. The Internet for All campaign seeks to deliver on this promise.
New York City can join municipalities across the country that are taking control of this essential utility. The infrastructure is here. The successful models exist. The only question is whether we have the political will to make internet access a right, not a privilege.
