Anti-Muni Broadband Bills Country Wide

Ant writes "Broadband Reports says that 14 and possibly more states that have or will pass(ed) bills banning community-run broadband. Free Pass shows a map breakdown of the states while Tallahassee.com takes a look at a newly proposed bill in Florida, backed by Sprint, BellSouth, Verizon, and Comcast, designed to bog down the muni-development process."

Comments

this is nothing new

[Lumpy]

Cable companies fought for and won laws that banned community run Cable TV type systems back in the early days of cable.

there used to be "community tv" or basically a neighborhood TV antenna setup. the would all get together and buy one large tower and good antennas as well as equipment to send the signal to the homes. these were made illegal in most places by cable tv companies in the area or coming into that area.

I know, my father used to set these up for smaller communities.

Re:this is nothing new

[Shadow99_1]

Uh what other network? Maybe you don't live where I do, but I have exactly one choice for phone service (Verizon), one choice for cbale TV (Time Warner), heck I have one choice for grocery store! You damned Moron! For gods sake if it wasn't mandated by law I doubt anyone would bother to offer us phone service. Not even Verizon bothers to offer us cellphone service (neither do the two other local cell providers from that big town I mention) for all that we are 30 miles away!

You want to know why? Well tough no ones bothering to answer you as to why, it just is. Has been, maybe always will be.

In place were their are no choices your statement makes not one bit of sense. Who am I going to go to?!? Their is no one else normally. Moving isn't the option either.

I'm tired of people who don't understand the point that bussiness doesn't allways (or even some of the time) do what is best for the people and so when that happens it might (just might now) make sense to let the local government provide a solution! Instead you'd rather I not have any options aparently, by blocking my (& my neighbors) ability to leverage our local tax dollars and government to help ourselves! What gives you the right to do that exactly?

I know this will go over your head (it has any other time I've ever tried to point this out on slashdot), but government isn't allways bad, heck companies aren't allways bad... What matters is what works for the people in the end. And if nothign else having a municipal run broadband that was successful would spur companies otherwise uninsterested in an area that maybe (just maybe!) their is a market and therefore money to be made giving me chocies in the end.

I don't understand

[Nine Tenths of The W]

Why can't the communities register broadband companies and run them in a style similar to mutual societies or worker's co-operatives?

I live in Tallahassee, we already have Canopy.

[newdamage]

Currently in Tallahassee you can get free wireless internet both downtown and at the airport. It's called Canopy, and it basically requires you to access a website first and then it connects you. It's quite convienent in the airport while you're waiting for a plane, I haven't had a chance to use it much downtown yet.

Also, just for reference: Comcast highspeed internet without cable, $55/month. Gotta love monopolies fighting tooth and nail to hang on to their huge profits.

Since Adam Smith, the balance has changed

[panurge]

We are still working on the outdated idea that government is big and we need to be protected from it, while business is small and needs free access to markets to flourish. This may be true still in a few places in the world, but increasingly the big government we need to be protected from is large companies.

Case in point: in our town, Walmart wanted to build on a green field site. By the time they got around to it zoning rules had changed, but guess what? Our small municipality could not afford the legal fees to take on Walmart. Big corporate crushing small government.

And this is the same thing again. The fact is, if small municipalities can afford to provide broadband at reasonable rates, the private suppliers should easily be able to match them. Because private enterprise is so much more efficient than public enterprise, isn't it?

Well, pardon me while I beg to differ. Why should private enterprise, with its private airplanes, hugely overpaid execs, vast corporate dick-swinging-contest headquarters, and layers of management, be so much more efficient than small community efforts where the management overhead is minimal and the project manager isn't spending most of his or her time trying to do down the internal competition for the coveted corner office job?

Private enterprise is very good at delivering capital goods cheaply, but actually not always terribly good at delivering services cheaply.

It is hard to understand on what basis private companies have the right to prevent citizens banding together to co-operate on projects, whether it be putting up a community hall or a local broadband service. Perhaps a constitutional lawyer could explain it, but an expert on the cash flow of lobby companies might do better.

They could ...

[pavon]

but then they couldn't fund it using tax-payer dollars. That is half of the appeal of municipal internet access - it is "cheap" or "free" because it is being subsidized by people who don't use it (those without computers), or who use it and are paying a disproportionate amount of the costs (the wealthy). The local telcos and cable companies are definately not providing the best bang-per-buck possible, mostly because there is not enough competition. But a small coop has it's own inefficiencies, and I would not expect them to be able to do much better than the existing broadband services on price - without sweetheart price-setting legislation forcing the hardline owners to offer their lines to the coop at whatever the politicians think is a "fair" price.

That said, even though I would not support government broadband in my community, I do not like these laws. I am a pragmatic liberterian but I also believe in democracy formost. If these comunities want thier towns to provide broadband, that is their decision to make. The federal government has no place telling the states what services they can and can't offer, and the states have no place telling the counties/towns what services they can and can't offer. Besides, the fact that there is such demand from the comunity for these services shows that the existing monopolies are not serving the people well, and creating legisation to enshrine them further is not the answer.

Re:Like I have always known...

[Doomdark]

I am of the opinion that free enterprise can always provide a service cheper than a government bureaucracy.

I disagree with your opinion. :-)
But at least opinions can be changed with facts... it'd be worse if you blindly "believed" it, like many here do.

Thing is, there are areas where non-profit organizations (governments included) can and do provide cheaper (better, more efficient, more complete) service. These are mostly in areas of health care, education and infrastructure. For example, most other western countries are what many rightist politicans would consider "socialistic" health care: such systems provide for better coverage (everyone gets treated, no medical bankruptcy if you get cancer etc. etc.), at about half the price (per-capita health care spending ratio between US and other industrialized countries). Same applies to education (interestingly enough, even the cost ratio is about the same: 2-to-1 in favour of society-sponsored system). And in the infrastructure area (where municipal networks woudl be), even US has government run entities like US Post Office... so there has to be something good in there.