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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."
Here in the Land of The Free (i.e. Western Europe), we allow our local/community governments to do what the electorate want them to do.
Aren't we naive....
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No rest for the weary. Even if its voted down, it will just come back at the next opportunity. That is why we don't get tired or frustrated, we stand strong and casually vote this crap down as many times as we have to.
Obviously community internet will lead to community controlled media eventually squeezeing out cable/phone and every other communication medium. I don't blame the companies one bit. But I will blame the government if they let this happen.
Community-backed broadband isn't the way we want to go. That sort of stuff is basically anti-capitalist at heart. Really. These companies might look like they're in it for the money, but really, they have our best interests at heart. Seriously. I promise.
Oh, and Saddam really did have all those weapons. Honest. I swear.
but on the other hand, I don't like rules that forbid a municipality from doing something which could benefit its citizens.
While in the vast majority of instances, it might be appropriate to ban a city from setting up its own ISP, there might be a few towns which are being ignored.
We have towns like that in my northern state. My father lives in a town with no broadband, heck, with NO local dial-up! To say that city can't set up its own ISP is ludicrous. The private sector has had decades to set up something but they've failed to even take notice. The city should be able to take action "for the common good" to set up its own.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Do you call this good? While I'm not 100% in support of community run networks (mostly due to the fact that there aren't enough smart people to run them securely in most communities), I think this illustrate the point quite well that governements no longer have power, the businesses do. After all, who has the most money? Your governments (state local and federal) or businesses? Considering the huge debt at the federal level and the deficits at state and local levels, my money (hehehe) is on the businesses controlling the most funds. And they say we have "big government", hah! It seems that during the past decade, as the tech sector has grown tremendously and gained the most wealth in a short time, more and more "laws and legal decisions" have been bought by them. We are headed rapidly for the corporate feudal system with our governments being democracies only in name. Wake up... we're only a few steps from complete fascism.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The bill in the works for Texas would kill not only municipal internet service but could be used to shut down municipal web sites, information channels, etc. "Information" services is a large amount of stuff to block with a single piece of legislation.l
http://www.freepress.net/communityinternet/=TXbil
Under the bill, municipalities and municipal electric utilities would be prohibited from providing, directly or indirectly, alone or in partnership with other service providers, either "telecommunications" or "information" services as those terms are defined under federal law.
In my small town of Spencer, IA we have a municipal provider of electricity, cable TV, phone, and broadband.
Phone costs $10.50/mo per line.
Basic Cable costs $5.00/mo
3Mbit/sec broadband costs $27.50/mo.
Not to mention some of the lowest electric rates in the state.
The reason we did this was because the local cable company had spent decades gouging on the prices on cable and having crappy service and we finally had enough of it and built our own system.
Mediacom still is around, but now charging fair prices. This municipal effort INCREASED COMPETITION, breaking the monopoly the phone and cable companies enjoyed for so many years.
I'm a firm believer in Municipal Utilities, if you have the chance to write a letter to your congresspeople by all means do it now.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
It's not just that they don't want municipalities competing against them -- they don't want groups competing against them who have open books.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
I can imagine that in smaller communities and perhaps larger ones, that 'local decency groups' would force local elected officials to censor objectionable content. Since they would be you ISP it would be easy to administer community standards. I can imagine that political hacks in charge of the network creating 'routing problems' which block opposition candidates, or the local rumor mill. Heck the local police could check on your email, or see which sites you visit. While larger communities might have good separation, smaller ones might even have the police dispatcher as the overnight server support!
I think that these laws should be written to include 'fair access' in the same way that local telephone companies are starting to open their own access, sort of a carrot and stick approach.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Learn politics. The local government is the orginised expression of the community. The whole purpose of the local government is to reprisent the comunity and take care of issues related to the community. If the local governement can do it cheaper than business, then so be it. Business better learn to compete.
By the way, the lack of cheap Internet access stalls the local economy. So it's in the best interest of community businesses to support community networks
With public wifi, the costs are an internet connection, and various adapters. (Don't have to pay for locations, businesses love having a free wifi connection in their business.)
With for pay, you added 'billing', and 'keeping track of who paid their bill', and all sorts of crap.
Sticking up a public network might cost, oh, 300 dollars a month, with a startup cost of 5000 dollars. (Probably need a system admin, but, then again, they probably already have an IT guy for the government. Or just have the local high school students volunter to run it.) This is trivially within reach of any town over 200 people.
Now add billing, and someone to keep track of it. Well, you could do that with income tax, except people don't pay local income tax. There are going to have to be bills sent.
Now add the fact that keeping track of the people on the network is now a full time job...you need to keep track of MAC addresses or logins or something, and match those up with the billing.
I mean, you've at least tripled the cost. You've probably added another full-time staff, and you've turned it into a business.
I mean, imagine the street in front of your house, and all those people who don't use it. Imagine all the streets that you don't use, and how you pay for them. Now imagine that the government could keep track of who used what streets, at least statistically, and just billed everyone for their existimated useage...that would cost a lot more than just having the streets.
Sometimes, just doing things for everyone is a hell of a lot cheaper than billing people for them. Yes, people without computers will pay for people who have them, but people in cities paied for phone lines in the country, and people without cars pay for roads, people without children pay for schools, etc, etc. A wifi broadband connection is peanuts compared to one road being built on the other side of the state, which you pay for all the time.
OTOH, my local touristy city has an open wifi network on the square that I think was setup by the Chamber of Commerce. Or just three or four businesses on the square working together. (Of course, I'm talking about a football field worth of coverage here, not a city.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?