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NC Governor Allows Anti-Community-Broadband Law
zerocore writes "North Carolina governor Bev Perdue will not veto a bill that will limit small town municipalities' ability to create community broadband when private industry will not go there. 'The governor said there is a need to establish rules to prevent cities and towns from having unfair advantage over private companies. But she said she was concerned that the bill would decrease the number of choices available to consumers. The bill would require towns and cities that set up broadband systems to hold public hearings, financially separate their operations from the rest of government operations, and bar from them offering below cost services. They also couldn't borrow money for the project without voter approval in a referendum.'"
No, it isn't. Even if it is just what the summary says, you have to adjust for the fact that the person who says it is almost certain to believe that any time the government provides a service at any price that it drives businesses out of business clear across the country.
I fail to see how communities creating their own broad band in areas where commercial ISPs aren't willing to create the service is going to create an unfair advantage to those communities. The main motivation behind the bill is pandering to a greedy and incompetent telecommunications industry.
If there were some reasonable hope of commercial ISPs going there, then yes this might be a problem. But I live in Seattle and we're likely to have to go this route because the ISPs refuse to provide us with decent affordable service. I'm fairly lucky where I live to only have to pay $50 a month and have the privilege of getting 5mbps for that, whereas in other parts of the country it's trivial to get 40mbps for $55 a month.
I think that if we were going to do it, these sorts of regulations would make some sense, but even there if the community is making a broad band network that works, I fail to see why we need commercial ISPs at all.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state I don't thinkt it's possible to create a passenger system that could pay for itself. Even when railroad networks became the primary means of long distance mass transit, freight actually paid the bills.
What's more, I'll wager that road systems don't pay for themselves and require considerable taxpayer support.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.