I don't think it is community owned, but the distinction doesn't seem that important from a customer experience standpoint. The scale and locality of the business is what makes it great. They can care a lot about the network quality because there isn't so much of it that they need to outsource everything. All elements of their infrastructure are not only on battery backup but also standby natural gas generators. My power and water go out before my fiber does. I've never had an outage outside of scheduled maintenance windows.
That works out great until some capital pool decides to start acquiring smaller isps to roll them up into a larger corporate behemoth. As has happened in multiple other industries from groceries, animal vets, rentals, software niches, to hospitals and these days nursing homes
Then the "efficiency" becomes how much can be extracted from the business and customers
Privately held companies have the option to reject these offers. A business doesn't have to be a non-profit or community-owned in order to do something principled. One good leader/owner is all it takes.
One pattern I see is small private companies that have that have a pretty great owner/leader, but it all breaks down near retirement, or hand-off to another generation of the owning family, or maybe a temporary financial bottleneck.
Maybe it's ok that small companies have lifetimes and get replaced, but the problem is that today, there is always a capital pool collecting and the large pools live forever, so maybe they won't collect today, but if they are systematically there at the transition points, then we get big entrenched interests with enough accumulated mass to bend the market rules.
And one bad (next) owner, a hostile takeover, a change of ordinances, a license not renewed, etc - there's so many ways to use money and entrenched positions to destroy a single business operator.
Everyone has a price. If you reject the offer but the ISP in the neighboring community doesn't, they'll grow into your area and use predatory pricing to get drive you out of business. A lot of roll-ups happen as the original owners retire, which happens regardless of how principled they are.
that can be made very hard to outright impossible (or prohibitively expensive) to do, if the foundational documents of the company are set up correctly. Say, a non-profit, or a cooperative-ownership model...
Yes, non-profits can be fucked up too (as we saw with "Open"AI recently) and cooperative-ownerships can be bought out if one is willing to spend enough money, but it at least raises the bar a significant amount.
I don't think it is community owned, but the distinction doesn't seem that important from a customer experience standpoint. The scale and locality of the business is what makes it great. They can care a lot about the network quality because there isn't so much of it that they need to outsource everything. All elements of their infrastructure are not only on battery backup but also standby natural gas generators. My power and water go out before my fiber does. I've never had an outage outside of scheduled maintenance windows.