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Supreme Court Rules Against Community Telcos
acherrington writes "Today the Supreme Court ruled against a group of Missouri communities offering telecom services where it is prohibited by Missouri law. At least eight other states -- Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia -- have similar laws. Today's ruling will most likely result in more lobbying by the Baby Bells at the state level to stop community-sponsored telecoms who are fed up with poor service and monopolies."
The local electric co-op, Trinity Valley Electric, had a phone subsidiary, Trinity Valley Services. When we moved to their service area last summer, I was exctatic to be out of the grasp of the scandal-plagued monopoly I'd been forced to buy power from before. So when we signed up for electricty and they asked if we'd like to use their phone service, we said heck, yeah!
Last month, we got a note in the mail that TVS was now "Cedar Valley Communications", and no longer directly affiliated with TVEC. This was pretty depressing... it was so nice to call up the phone company and talk to a person instead of to a robot.
Now, it makes sense. With an 8-1 decision in the works, TVEC/TVS must have known that they were about to get hammered by Texas law. With little hope for legislative help from the Republican puppet government in Austin, they spun off TVS.
At least I don't have to worry about getting a bill from the clueless megacorporation I was stuck with before.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The ruling prohibits governmental entities (cities, counties, other municipalities, or groups thereof) of entering the telecom business.
Nothing precludes any small private coop, company, or partnership from becoming a telecom provider.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 says that "states may not prohibit 'any entity' from getting into the phone business. That does not include political subdivisions of states, said Justice David H. Souter, writing for the court."
This ruling is a good thing, as it keeps government out of the telecom business, where it belongs.
If I read correctly, the ruling is pro-states' rights, not anti-community telecom. They assert that states have the right to prohibit cities from engaging in a particular activity, not that states are required to prohibit such activity. IANAL, I did not read this article but I read a similar article earlier, insert your disclaimer here.
More music, fewer hits
Among the industries taken over or overregulated by the Gov:
Rail Trains
Pharmacies
Telecom
I usually agree with your comments, but I think you're a bit off today.
Rail Trains - all but dead
True, but not because of government regulation. In fact, it was lack of government foresight that allowed the auto and tire industries to shut down rail-based public transit.
Pharmacy - corrupt and overpriced
In what way does this have to do with the government? Compare the "market-based" (read: monopoly-controlled) US system with the Canadian system. Note that buses of US citizens head to Canada for cheap drugs -- not the other way around.
Telecom - sucks oh so bad
The comparison this time would be with Europe. I'm no expert, but everything I read on Slashdot indicates that Europe's regulation of telcos resulted in a superior wireless network, while the US corporate welfare system caused a tangled mess of incompatible systems.
"The Government" isn't the solution to all problems... but neither is "The Market".
On the other hand, your comment has been moderated as "Funny", so maybe I just didn't get the joke and should come down off my high horse...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Somehting like Community Government...
:)
The article wasn't that long, took all of half a minute to read. It boils down to:
1. Earlier law states entities may create their own telco groups (close enough, I don't have that window open anymore)
2. Local and city governments are sub-parts of the state government
3. The government doesn't count as an entity in part 1
4. Therefore: Local and city governments do not have this allowance under the specied law.
3 cheers for all the posters crying about loss of rights and rewriting laws and such, if they had read the article it probably would have been slashdoted by the time I got there
Whee signature.
If only there were any context to this, so you could learn something meaningful from it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
but nothing in the constitution allows the federal government to PREVENT a state from engaging in interstate commerce.
No, there isn't. But what the SC did was allow states to prevent cities from starting their own telcos, if the state wants to. In other words, the SC gave more power to the state... by taking it away from cities and other, smaller government bodies.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
With little hope for legislative help from the Republican puppet government in Austin, they spun off TVS.
That seems an odd position to take, given that it's the Republican FCC commissioner that keeps pushing for the legalization of competition in communications, and fighting off the courts when they try to turn it back.
The local electric co-op, Trinity Valley Electric, had a phone subsidiary, Trinity Valley Services. [...] Last month, we got a note in the mail that TVS was now "Cedar Valley Communications", and no longer directly affiliated with TVEC. [...] Now, it makes sense. With an 8-1 decision in the works, TVEC/TVS must have known that they were about to get hammered by Texas law.
That doesn't make sense either. As another poster has already pointed out, the Supreme Court decision was against GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS (cities, townships, counties, etc.) running phone companies. A Co-op is a corporation with its customers as its stockholders - as strictly private eneterprise as any other corportation. Unless TVE is a misledingly-misnamed government entity the ruling would not apply to it.
When we moved to [TVE's] service area last summer, I was exctatic to be out of the grasp of the scandal-plagued monopoly [bucorp] I'd been forced to buy power from before.
As far as scandal-plauging, there are few scandals to equal the routine operation of nearly ANY government operation. I, for one, am more than happy to see the big government, now that it's broken up the national telephone monopoly (a creature of its own regulation), telling the little governments to dump their own creatures.
To anyone who lives in a region with its own city phone service, who believes that their service is good and wants to keep it that way, I have this suggestion:
Go to the legislature of the governmental body that runs the little tellco (i.e. city council or whatever) and suggest they spin it out as a coop. (This will preserve much of its structure, and give the customers even more say in its operation than they had as citizens of the parent governmental division.)
If you don't do this, expect your government to sell it to the local corporate-behemoth tellco at a kickback-driven bargan price - which will be paid off at compound interest in your next telephone bills.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This has nothing to do with community telcos; it's about city and state governments getting into the telco business. The article headline is a blatant troll. There again, it is Michael.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
That's baloney. Powell's son is trying to get others to do his work for him, and the courts have stated he hasn't been granted the authority to do that by congress. You can paint it anyway you want, but I have paint thinner.
= 9J =
Counties are nothing more than a subdivision of the state. In fact, almost *all* state statutes are enforced by counties.
Incorporated cities are, also, subject to regulation by the state. In fact it is the states grant of regulatory powers to cities that allows them to exist at all.
This ruling only affects a state's ability to regulate subdivisions of state government.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The city of Alameda, on the SF Bay, generates their own power. In the year of extortionistic prices(1), residents of Alameda maintained low prices.
Public utilities will often fail when the don't innovate where private companies could.
Clearly, despite (ironythere) the TeleCommunications act of 1996, our phone services have NOT innovated (DSL doesn't count, it was there before, waiting for both demand and switch updates and, frankly, external equipment, to drive it).
How many of us know places who can't get DSL? I'm in a major metro area and can't get CALLER ID!!. They plead that the switches aren't yet equipped, etc, etc.
These are the companies that won't lay fiber when the roads are open. In the fire area of the hills of oakland, after the roads BOILED away, they refused pleas to put in fiber when they where trenching.
My mom's rural phone switch only got touch tone when the area gov't MANDATED it. The e911 project was how they got an updated switch. Government mandate, not the ignored customer demand.
So business, in this case, is acting as incompetant as I'd expect gov't to act. Yet I have more faith in local gov't that is accountable to people around them than I do in say, SBC, which sprawls across the country. Or Verizon. Talking to the workers out there in the field, they generally concur. Profits are funnelled out of profitable california, where workers are swapping supplies ala radar OReilly.
If cable service, phone and power, regulated monopolies all with little actual competition, are not providing what a town's citizens need, then the only real choice is to offer an alternative themselves.
The Telecom Act has as one of its goals the promotion of competition in the industry. So the Act says a state may not prohibit "any entity" from entering the telecom business. The question was whether a state law prohibiting a municipality from entering the telecom business would violate the Telecom Act. Thus, the Court had to determine whether a municipality was an "entity" for the purposes of the law. Justice Souter said no, because the normal language that Congress uses when it wants to define how states may regulate their businesses and municipalities is "any entity or political subdivision." So, by tradition, when Congress says "entity" that means private business, and "political subdivision" means just that. Therefore, Justice Souter said that since Congress omitted political subdivisions from the limitations it put on state power to ban entry into the telecom business, the states are free to ban the entry of their political subdivisions, i.e. municipalities, from the telecom market. Lots of indirection here. Watch out!
Exactly -- the supreme court ruled that the feds have no authority to regulate whether or not states allow local governments to set up telcos.
This was NOT a ruling against "community telcos" - in fact, it is a ruling for states rights. and the people of most states have not forbade their local governments from creating telcos.. whcih means (you guessed it) this ruling doesn't have a damn thing to do with them.
still, I'll reply to your query with an example of why it's a bad thing to allow states to become telcos: here in Starkville MS, back in the mid 90's when the world was making the leap onto the web, we had only one ISP - it was the local college, Miss State University. And the service was free to the community, but you had to pay for the long distance bill yourself if you lived out of town - which most folks do.
And none of those "greedy corporations" like AOL or Compuserve woould move into the area, because they felt they couldn't compete with "free." So, for years, the people in Starkville got free internet dialup service while the rest of us paid about ten cents a minute.
FINALLY the college cut the cord - you didn't get to log into the campus network unless you were a student. Within months there were three ISPs in the area, all of them expanding rapidly out from town into local telco dialing areas. Now you can choose from a variety of ISPs even in the most rural Mississippi communities... all because the local state funded institution FINALLY got out of the business of providing free community access to a valuable service.
And before you go complaining about sending all that money out of state, I'll point out that at least one of those local competitors was a fellow who started with a few phone lines and grew the business into one of the largest ISPs in the area. He's now a retired Millionaire, and he's a local boy who gave a lot of other local folks jobs (and no, this doesn't have anything to do with Worldcom - that's down in the south part of the state).
At the same time, the area has many MORE new jobs because that same organization (the state funded university) is providing infrastructure to businesses who move into the local research park. Which was created on the back of the universtity, but still exists as a private entity which pays the university for services - an option available even to the people in these states where there ARE laws against the state providing telco services.
Common sense says that if the community wanted a nature preserve there, they should have purchased the property and made it one. Running to the government to bar development of private property after the fact* is not a community rights issue. The community has no right to selectively and arbitrarily prohibit development based on its whims and fancies.
* the property was likely previously purchased based on its suitability for building and it zoning
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The rail network is not kep alive for redundancy, it's a VERY efficient method of cargo transportation. Almost all of the truck cargo that had any significant distance to go gets driven to a rail station, loaded onto a train, moved to another station, then unloaded and hooked to trucks.
In Flagstaff, Arizona you see 60+ trains carring thousands of tons each day.
Passanger transport isn't the railroad's main use. It's not like Europe. In Europe, there's a ton of light rail, made for high speed passenger trains. Here is't all heavy rail, made for slower cargo trains. You can (and Amtrack does) run passenger traffic on it, but that's not the reason for it to exist.
It takes about 1% of the energy to move something by train as it does by truck an equal distance. Multiply that by millions of tons and thousands of miles and it quickly becomes apparent why trains are here to stay.
This is also why the government keeps up the Interstate highways. In theory, in the state of war on the US mainland, the Army could easily control any stretch of Interstate highway so that vital convoys could have a fast and trafic-free mostly-direct path from one metro area to another.
In theory nothing. This is exactly why the U.S. interstate highway system is so well developed. The intent was speficially to allow military vehicles quick access to any part of the country. Interstate highways were also designed such that the government (military, police, or whoever) could quickly take complete control of any given section simply by closing the on-ramps. Many sections were also built to be easily converted into ad-hoc runways for military aircraft.
You might also hear the highway system referred to as the National Defense Highways, but most likely only in your history books. Dwight D. Eisenhower lobbied and eventually convinced congress to pass the the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which would provide for 41,000 miles of road (total) by 1975.
This has been another Slashdot history lesson. Thank you.
I didn't actually comment directly on the Missouri issue, so I'm not sure how I'm wrong in regards to it...
Anyway, it turns out that in this case I DO agree with the Court, since they are simply allowing State law to trump that of municipalities.
However, I was actually commenting on various jackasses talking generally about the role of the government... my point is that it's generally whatever we as a people want it to be.
What is/was the scandal? I'd like to know because I write them a check every month :/
In 2002, their European operations took a nosedive, and they had to borrow a wad o'cash to get things back together. I can't find any decent muckraking on the events, probably because the local paper is widely known to be a corporate tool (just ask these guys or these guys).
But here's one mention (2/3 down the page), and the local paper did mention the problems in a puff piece saying how great everything is now: turn off JavaScript to read without registration (google cache also requires you turn off JS).
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
"As far as scandal-plauging, there are few scandals to equal the routine operation of nearly ANY government operation. I, for one, am more than happy to see the big government, now that it's broken up the national telephone monopoly (a creature of its own regulation), telling the little governments to dump their own creatures."
You're a Republican, your boys control Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and have taken "scandal" to depths unplumbed since Caligula: ignoring al Qaeda until 9/11/01, then turning that into Iraqmire, outing Valerie Plame at CIA, creating the biggest $2T government ever, spending the biggest-ever $5T surplus on his bestest rich buddies for the biggest ever $10T debt, and lies lies lies. When are you going to drop that ridiculous "smaller government" lie? Or better yet, join the Democratic Party, which has actually balanced the budget, shrunk government, and protected Americans, in spite of the incessant sabotage of Republicans in government, media and boardrooms.
--
make install -not war
That seems an odd position to take, given that it's the Republican FCC commissioner that keeps pushing for the legalization of competition in communications, and fighting off the courts when they try to turn it back.
Republicans say they are for individual rights, states rights, free markets, free enterprise, and competition. But saying and doing are two different things.
In fact, "individual rights" is just a code word for pushing a Christian right agenda; when people try to assert their individual rights (abortion, sex, nudity, gay rights, etc.), Republicans want to restrict things and punish. With the Republicans, you get individual rights, as long as you are a good, conforming Christian and spend a lot of money.
"States rights" is a codeword for shifting federal taxes to the states, which makes it easy to claim to have lowered federal taxes; when states try to actually assert their "states rights" (drugs, gay marriage, etc.), the Republicans are up in arms.
And "free enterprise" to Republicans means getting in bed with big businesses; efficient and responsive community operated utilities don't fit into that concept (after all, they don't make big campaign contributions to federal politicians).
Democrats have their own set of misleading codewords, but, on balance, I still think the kind of deception and word games the Republicans play are still more harmful.