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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.
This opens up a bunch of things now. Does this mean I can't let people share my wireless connection, for instance, without them breathing down my neck? The decision means total support for the local monopoly, which is sad indeed.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
This will be a good thing for emerging private telecom businesses, as it will remove competition coming from groups funded by state or city government. The government has no place competing with private citicens in the telecom industry, and today's decision by the Supreme Court, was the right one.
Among the industries taken over or overregulated by the Gov:
Rail Trains
Pharmacies
Telecom
Current status:
Rail Trains - all but dead
Pharmacy - corrupt and overpriced
Telecom - sucks oh so bad
If only there were a pattern so we could learn something from this.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
You would think that the Congress of the 90s would be unafraid of small towns starting their own telcos. After all, governement is so "inefficient" in their minds that they couldn't possibly compete with such "efficient" and capable telcos like SBC, MCI and Global Crossing for services like DSL, etc....
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Whats happening to the little guy, or the right of communities to represent themselves ? The local community has traditionally been the proving ground for an enterprising individual. Communities no longer seem to have any power, or rights in the locations they represent.
I remember a case in Roswell (or was it Alpharetta), GA where a car (Lexus?) dealership huffed and puffed and blew down the wishes of the people who wanted to keep the area as a nature preserve. That community lost the battle to the car dealership. Not related to telco, but none the less, an erosion of community rights, not to mention common sense.
Sigh....
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
Was this case badly reported, or did the Supreme Court just ignore the plain english used in the law?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I first read the headline as "Supreme Court Rules Against Taco" and thought oh jeez what has he done this time?
5 out of 4 people have trouble with fractions.
No, actually it's NOT a free market decision. It prevents local citizens from using THEIR institutions to band together and fight monopolistic utilities.
Since private corporations are so "efficient" they should have ZERO trouble defeating "inefficient" government organizations with superior products and service. For example, the stellar service of SBC could just blow ANY municipal telco away!!!!
BTW, this law is plainly unconstitutional. It denies state governmental agencies from exercising a "non-enumerated" power. Yes, states cannot constrain inter-state commerce (telecommunications) but nothing in the constitution allows the federal government to PREVENT a state from engaging in interstate commerce.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Does anyone actually think that this Supreme Court and it's ties to big business and partial views (Scalia and Cheney) will actually rule for the people? Then I've gor some land to sell you!
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.
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.
I read the article(more like a blurb) but I haven't dug further (I live in WI so it doesn't mean much to me right now)..
Couldn't these companies use VOIP? As of right now VOIP isn't considered a typical phone service and regulated by Big Brother correct?
Or are they typical overly broad and generalized laws that apply to any way of providing a service using a phone?
No sig for you!!
I'm curious what (if any) effect this ruling will have on telcos sponsored by non-profit organizations. My undergraduate college is has just started a communications company to serve the community. Which side of the line do these organizations fall under?
JGG
In the way the USA economy is set up, there's only one place for a government-backed company to exist. That's where there's no way any business could provide that service if it had to compete, yet that service is vital to our way of life.
For example, take the US Postal Service. A daily mail pickup and drop-off at every address in the USA (including the most rural) would simply be impossible if there was not one and only one company providing that service. This is a perfect case of a service the rest of the government depends on, that likely would not exist if the free market was left to fend for itself. FedEx and UPS can compete in the high-price overnight market with the USPS, but nobody else has the ability to get a physical document from any point in the USA to any other point in the USA for 37 cents, or less than that even if you have a large volume of mail and pre-sort it properly.
In the case of Amtrak, the government is keeping the national railroad network alive for the sake of transportation redundancy. This came into play after the 9/11 attacks when all air traffic in the USA was grounded... the trains were able to keep running and some people and things were able to reroute themselves to get where they were going.
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.
So long as there's still a profit to be made in the ISP business, then the government doesn't belong in it, just to regulate it so things don't get out of hand. If things ever do get totally out of hand (and we're nowher near that yet), then the government should step in to make sure there's affordable Internet access for the sake of keeping the network alive.
This is one case where it is better to have a large corporate monolith providing your service rather than a small municipal monopoly. One of my friends lives in Atoka, TN and their only choice for service is the Millington Phone Company. For two years that phone company has been promising broadband and better service, but have never come through on those promises. My friend is very mad because people just 200 yards down the street have BellSouth and broadband service. She even asked BellSouth if they could run a line the 220 yards, but BellSouth said that they couldn't because of the Millington monopoly. My friend has talked to whoever she could, even the FCC with no results. It looks like the Supreme Court was who she should have been talking to all along.
Smeghead every day of the week.
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
with businesses. Governments tax any business in their areas. It's not fair to be able to tax a business and then use the funds to provide a competing service.
Privately owned co-ops are OK, but the costs may be prohibitive.
Oh, don't sound so condescending. Capitalism and its unchecked greed can cause just as many problems as a socialistic society. They're just different problems.
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 =
The Republican FCC can out strong against the little guy in this case as you can see in the first two paragraphs of the Court's decision.
The little guy in this case was a group of rural counties.
The court ruled that the word "any" in the federal law prohibiting states from regulating any telecom does not mean that states cannot regulate counties because they are political subdivisions of the states and therefore states should have a right to regulate themselves.
So much for the Rublican idea of local control!
See for yourself:
Findlaw.com
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"
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Oh, get a clue.
Rail traffic ... have you ever considered the subsidies
the government offers to the auto, road, and aviation industries?
In terms of subsidy per passenger mile, those industries
are far more heavily subsidized than rail traffic.
Or to put it differently, the problems rail traffic has
are basically that its competition is so extensively subsidized
that it's all but impossible to compete.
"Our" government is quite heavily in the business of distorting the economy. Primarily to benefit military industries (the auto industry only really took off after WW2, as a way to turn tank-production capacity into a dual-use technology) at the expense of more naturally efficient mechanisms. Although the individual characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? were clearly not real, except maybe Jessica Rabbit!, the plot to abolish the public transport system is very well documented as being true. But the major war contractors were allowed to get away with it.
Profit is not God. Although far too many of the people now running "our" government worship it, even when it conflicts with their basic responsibilities to support healthy (local) communities and to support civil rights.
The area that I'm concerned about here: will this regulation retard development of free wireless services like The Personal Telco Project.
Like basic municipal services, roads, sidewalks, water, sewers, and trash that facilitate good health and transportation and indirectly
Na, I think that facilitating communication is one of the jobs municipalities. This is one of the purposes of roads and sidewalks. Lest we forget how mail travels and the greatest communication organization in the history of the world
Of course we should remember that the Postal Service has been supplanted by quicker, more agile competition
Republicans have MANY myths. One of the biggest is that Government doesn't innovate. In fact, public agencies do a pretty good job in some areas (certainly not all, we don't live in a black/white world). In the realm of communications, government agencies have done a DAMN GOOD job.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
know having an accent does not imply stupidity. True, but when you're already stupid AND you have an accent, it makes things more amusing.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
They already did that with the local cable company.
Rates are up 80% since. Sure we have 10 more channels, but most of them worthless.
I WILL be at the city council meeting if they ever even hint about selling of the municipal phone company.
And yes, I do believe that the cable was sold off for a kickback-driven bargin price.
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.
Unfortunately it misses 5 state capitals:
:)
The five State capitals not directly served by the Interstate System are Juneau, Alaska; Dover, Delaware; Jefferson City, Missouri; Carson City, Nevada; and Pierre, South Dakota.
Wow. How'd they get Honolulu, Hawaii connected to the Interstate system?
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.
That in America there were laws _against_ monopolies! I must have been misinformed.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
Can you remember when your telco used to be more concerned with service than profit?
I can remember when my telco used to be run by the government (in New Zealand). The service sucked. It sucked in ways you could not possibly compare to the relatively minor ways in which the privatised telcos in NZ now suck.
When I first ordered a phone line that I wanted to run a BBS on I...
(1) Had to take a day off school just to make the phone call to order it, because it took 2-4 hours just for someone to answer the call, and they only took calls from 9-4pm.
(2) Had to wait for six weeks before the line could be installed.
(3) Had to break the law to run my BBS because only "authorized" equipment could be connected to the phone lines, and said equipment usually cost about five times as much as "unauthorized" equipment.
A couple of years later, after the phone service had been privatised I ordered a second line. The call was taken with about a 5 min wait, the line was installed inside 2 business days, and I didn't have to risk jail time when using a modem of my own choice.
Granted, the old government owned telco in New Zealand is probably a standout case for sheer suckitude, but in general government owned monopolies are just as bad, and often far worse, than privately owned monopolies.
Bell Canada. It was the only game in town. A MONOPOLY. But, it was under government control, and (at that time), the government wasn't (so much) the enemy of the people. In regard to the telecom game, they pretty much did a worthy job. That is, if Bell screwed you, a simple call to the CRTC would get their butts kicked into shape and your connection flowing nice and smooth.
In the Eighties, it cost $15 a month for basic service. There were no extra fees, and Bell couldn't refuse to hook you up. FIFTEEN BUCKS a month.
What did competition bring?
Well, first of all, there isn't actually any competition. There's STILL only one phone system; it's just that now third party companies are allowed to buy discount bandwidth on that one system and re-sell it at lower rates. --And they don't have to pay to help maintain the physical system. Hmm.
And how does the phone company react to all that dropping revenue and the increasing cost of maintenance and development in a growing market? Why, they raise the cost of basic local service! Something goes wrong with your land line? Well, now it costs $100 bucks just to get some contracted company out to look at your phone. (Unless you buy the 'insurance' package for a few extra dollars per month).
And now if somebody screws you, who do you call? That's right! Nobody. Now, if you're unhappy, you're supposed to switch over to a different carrier, because that's how competition works!
On paper, anyway. --And only if a couple of chapters and logical positions are deliberately missing from the Free Market handbook.
If there was 'real' competition, there'd be more than one company stringing lines up all across the country. And that's called, "redundant, wasteful stupidity". Because competition slims down bloated structures, right? Sure.
There is NOTHING wrong with the idea of socially controlled telecommunications. Communications shouldn't BE a profit-making venture. It's a vital resource to a healthy society. Do you want to talk to people who enjoy sharing ideas, or would you rather communication happen among a bunch of Lawyers who think in terms of "Billable Minutes"?
I think enough discussion and information has been presented over the years to quite put an end to the reign of 'Free Market' armchair philosophers who read a book on it once, and who vote for square-jawed right-wing criminals who promise to punish the 'lazy' unemployed, but who make policy to ensure that unemployment is nice and high so that Big Business will have permanent access to cheep labor.
My phone service and phone bills suck now thanks to 'free market' politics and the people who push for such things. Thanks guys. The worst part is that I saw it coming, bitched and complained, and the world patted me on the head and called me silly.
Ah well. At least most of the hobbits are using cell phones now. It's easier than ever to walk through the world unchallenged, now that most people have voluntarily radiated their brains. Just don't get caught playing by the house rules! Man! Hell hath no fury like a muggle trying to categorize you on a computerized form!
"I don't need one of those awkward and painful a brains. See? Instead, I have a set of instructions! Much easier! Amd Thou Shalt Not. .
-FL
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.