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Texas Wireless Ban Has Failed
chip rosenthal writes "The effort to ban municipal networks in Texas has failed. Texas House Bill 789 originally had provisions to ban muni wireless networks. The Senate passed a significantly rewritten version, without a ban. A conference committee failed to reach agreement, so the bill died when the Texas legislature adjourned this weekend."
Close call. The attempt to forbid cities and towns from offering wireless services was seriously misguided.
Public wireless is like roads and street lights. Like roads, public wireless access enables economic development. When a road is paved, houses and businesses spring up around it. When an urban area has street lighting, business and civic life continues into the night.
Most streets aren't toll roads, and street lights don't have a fee per block. These services are generally accepted to provide public benefit above and beyond the revenue they would bring if they relied on fee-for-service funding.
Networking is in an early stage, like street lights were a long time ago. Cities and towns ought to be able to make their own decisions about what will bring economic development to their area. Each municipality makes its own decisions about roads and public transportation. Similarly, the decision about whether and how to provide wireless services should be a local decision. We don't want to *prevent* cities and towns from choosing to provide wireless as a service that will incent additional economic activity. We don't want to mandate one model, for the whole state, in an early stage of development.
Internet access is not, never has been, and should not be considered a basic public service.
The Internet is a medium of communication for individuals and groups, organizations, and companies, people and assemblies of all kinds. As a medium of communication, putting ownership and control of access to it in the hands of government is a very very bad idea that relies on a false idea that the government can be trusted because it is the government which gives us rights and therefore will protect them on any service it provides.
This nation, as with all other nations of humans, has a long history of illustrating just the opposite. Government descends from our basic rights as humans, not the other way around. We make right of our right to free will to choose to organize and co-operate under governance, not to exist at the leisure of it.
Governments inherently being creatures of our darker tendencies and mob rule, are not and never have been given inherently towards respecting or protecting our rights, but ever seek to intrude upon them and limit them.
Yet despite all the socialist alarm bells about the present president turning this nation into the bastard offspring of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the same people all too often seem to think that government should provide the conduit through which we express ourselves. If this be the case, then let us turn over all the printing presses, computers, word processors, typewriters, phones and phone service and paper supplies and all other mediums of communication right now to the government.
Anyone trust that the government will distribute these mediums as best fits our rights and needs or would they do as they more often do, limit, choke, control?
Internet service by government is to put that access in the hands of politicians and politics. Two things that should be kept as far away and have as little contact as possible with it. Putting my tax dollars on this is tantamount to forcing me to contribute to something destined to become embroiled ina civil rights clusterf*ck of all time in the near future. Let us cut to the chase and not go there in the first place.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Spoken like a true zealot... never-the-less, I shall try.
1. The bill would have PREVENTED local government from offering these services. The fact that it failed to pass is , in no way shape fashion or form, a mandate that local governments SHOULD provide it.
2. In the current system, a voter referendum is still required for any city to proceed. Remind me again how we've extended the power of government beyond previous limits?
3. Most muni broadband/wireless projects are funded via bond-issue, open access fees and user subscription fees. Relatively few of them rely on tax dollars to build or maintain the system. Those that are funded by tax dollars almost universially are required (by law) to get voter approval before work can even begin. You do vote, right? You know, that thing we do to determine who governs us, and what they are allowed to do?
4. This is not an issue of 'The Government' trying to trample the rights of 'The Individual' or 'Free Enterprise'. It is an issue of preventing 'Big Government' (state) from preventing 'Little Government' (local) government trying to spur economic development (which is in its own interest as well) by providing services that provide value to citizens and businesses, but aren't lucrative enough to interest private enterprise (in this case, limited monopolies... I notice you didnt scream too much about them manipulating the individual by creating artifical scarcity/demand).
5. Take off your tinfoil hat and realize that not all aspects of government are bad or irrational. It is true that our form of government is subject the excesses of it's representatives, but it will also adjust itself (given the opportunity and an interested populace) - which is better than most.
This was an arbitrary law limiting municipal governments' ability to provide an important service in an underserved area. It takes nothing away from constituents except for their right to decide how their corner of the world is governed. It EXPANDED the grasp of government, instead of narrowing it. It artifically limited the rights of the local populace to choose their relationship to their government at the bequest of major commercial interests.
6. Before posting on an issue you obviously know nothing about, take an hour to familiarize yourself with it JUST A BIT. Like most things in life/government there is typically a great deal more involved than is immediately apparent, and releveant to your personal agenda. I li ve in texas, and I know what this law meant, and you'll forgive me if I prefer to be able to choose for myself what I allow my local government to do with my own vote!