Digital Public Goods: When Open Source Serves Citizens
In 2008, Katie Espeseth was on the ground floor of building a 9,000-mile fiber network for a mid-sized city in Tennessee. EPB, Chattanooga’s city-owned electric utility, had decided to lay fiber alongside its smart grid to manage power distribution.
Broadband was almost an afterthought. AT&T lobbied the state legislature to restrict EPB’s service area. The utility built the network anyway, became the first provider in the US to offer gigabit internet citywide, and has since generated $5.3 billion in net community benefits for Hamilton County, on an initial build cost of $280 million. The story remains one of the strongest examples of digital public goods in practice.
This is what digital public goods look like when they work. Not products competing for market share. Infrastructure filling gaps that the market decided were not worth filling.
The case against municipal investment
The argument against public infrastructure is not entirely wrong. Provo, Utah, spent $39 million on a municipal network, ran it in the red for years, and eventually sold it to Google Fiber for $1 rather than continue absorbing losses.
A University of Pennsylvania Law School study found that many public broadband networks may be unable to cover their long-term operating costs. Public investment in technology infrastructure carries real financial risk, and the governance structures of municipal utilities do not always lend themselves to the fast iteration that network technology requires.
Chattanooga’s model survived because EPB was already a functioning utility with operational discipline, rate-setting authority, and a customer base it was legally obligated to serve. The fiber network inherited that institutional foundation. Cities that launched standalone broadband projects without comparable infrastructure often found themselves competing directly with well-capitalised incumbents on cost grounds they could not win.
The question is not whether public broadband can work. It is whether the conditions that made EPB work exist in the city and whether they can be replicated.
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance tracks over 450 community-owned broadband networks operating across the US, ranging from small rural operations to full-service metropolitan ones. EPB offers gigabit internet for $68 per month.
The private alternative in Hamilton County before EPB entered the market was slower and more expensive.
Digital public goods and what gets built when there’s no profit motive
The Modular Open-Source Identity Platform was built at the International Institute for Information Technology Bangalore in 2018, funded by the Gates Foundation, Tata Trust, and Omidyar Network, specifically to give governments a digital identity infrastructure they could deploy without vendor lock-in. No proprietary system, no recurring license fee, and no vendor controls the data.
TechCabal’s December 2025 investigation into Nigeria’s MOSIP deployment documented the scale: Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission began migrating its foundational identity system to MOSIP in July 2025, with support from a World Bank-supported $430 million programme.
As of October 2025, NIMC had issued approximately 124 million National Identification Numbers. The country issued 14 million in 2000. It issued 114 million by 2024. The scale of the gap that needed closing and the speed at which MOSIP is closing it would not have been commercially viable for any single vendor to undertake without pricing structures that would have excluded the population that needed it most.
MOSIP now has more than 80 commercial vendors providing ancillary services. The open architecture created a competitive market for implementation services rather than consolidating revenue at the platform layer. One African country enrolled 550,000 students in government benefits by importing their existing biometric data from education records into the identity system.
The tool was built specifically for that migration, contributed back to the platform, and is available to any government that needs it.
Where the comparison holds and where it doesn’t
The Provo row is in the table because it is what honest comparison requires. Digital public goods do not automatically outperform private markets.
They outperform private markets that have decided not to compete seriously, whether because the margin is not there, the population is not profitable, or the lock-in economics do not work when the software is designed to prevent it.
| Initiative | What It Does | Investment | Measurable Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| EPB Fiber, Chattanooga | Municipal broadband and smart grid serving all city residents | $280 million initial build | $5.3 billion in net community benefits since 2011; gig internet at $68/month |
| MOSIP digital identity | Open-source national ID platform deployed by governments | Funded by foundations; $430M World Bank programme for Nigeria alone | 124 million NIDs issued in Nigeria; active in the Philippines, Morocco, Ethiopia, and others |
| Provo, Utah municipal broadband | City-owned broadband network | $39 million | Sold to Google Fiber for $1 after years of operating losses |
The reproducibility problem
EPB’s story is constantly cited as a template. It rarely gets reproduced at an equivalent scale. EPB’s Vice President of New Products, Katie Espeseth, identifies grassroots community support during construction as critical to a successful launch. The institutional precondition of a functioning municipal utility with operational credibility is at least as important and harder to create from scratch.
The reproducibility challenge for digital public goods is different. The platform scales because the software is actually free, with no hidden licensing tiers. And the architecture is designed for national-level deployment. The gap between deploying MOSIP and having a functioning national identity system involves procurement, systems integration, biometric device certification, data center infrastructure, and institutional capacity that no software license can provide.
Nigeria’s $83 million tender for a systems integrator covers everything the open-source license does not include. Digital public goods lower the floor. They do not eliminate the climb.
Distilled
Digital public goods succeed when they address needs that markets have limited incentives to serve. Whether the goal is affordable broadband or national digital identity, the value often comes from accessibility, interoperability, and long-term public benefit rather than short-term commercial returns.
Their success, however, depends on more than open technology. Governance, operational expertise, funding, and implementation capacity remain critical to long-term outcomes. Open infrastructure and open-source software can lower barriers, but they cannot replace institutional capability.
The strongest digital public goods combine public-interest objectives with sustainable operating models. When those conditions exist, they can continue delivering value long after purely commercial incentives have shifted elsewhere.
