Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
How about the Open Source crowd figuring a way to deliver broadband for free or close to free? Why not!
Is there a problem here? If the bill is truly what the summary (read the article? never!) makes it out to be, it sounds quite reasonable.
If a town wants to start a new bus line, or double the number of stops, or open a new school, or put water fountains on Main Street, they just hold a vote at a city council meeting.
If a town wants to hang some antennas to offer a public amenity on Main Street, probably costing about as much as the water fountains, they gotta go through the equivalent of a consent decree. This sounds like broadband provider protectionism to me. That a municipal utility can provide better service than a private utility is an open question and a lot of cities do very well with publicly-owned electric grids and traction transit; adding hoops to jump through for broadband wifi in particular is just a way of protecting Comcast's fiefdom.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Damn straight, we all know that corporations are good and that gubmint is evil and providing quality services will ultimately lead to us all being slaves to the all power President.
I am so sick of seeing this happen. The municipal wifi project in my town was canceled by time warner. The end result was that 3 years later there is still no public wifi downtown, half of the surrounding neighborhoods still dont have coverage for anything but dial up and the people living here have exactly 1 choice for internet. My cable/internet bill is $178 a month for basic cable and 5/1 internet service.
Bev Perdue is very much a democrat, and seems to want government interference in everything else - just not where it might actually help the state.
There's a reason people and businesses are leaving in droves...
Someone should write an Onion article about states banning/hampering municipal water systems because Coke and Pepsi demand it.
Preach it brother.
Can't people be content with a genuine internet (not a centralized monstrosity) where people are contributing to websites Peer to peer the way it was designed?
Imagine that, everyone writing articles and blogging in their own sphere of their town. Beautiful. It would be like a wiki but at the town-level. That's what the web should be like.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Right. More public projects should have to comply with requirements like these. Transit systems being an excellent example.
Transit systems are a completely different beast. The cost savings for the city are only found when you look outside the system. More productivity when workers can get to work because they aren't in traffic. less road rage. less accidents. less emergency runs for car accidents meaning police have more time for looking for criminals. less road repair. Firemen putting out fires instead of carrying the jaws of life to cut some guy out of his SUV rollover.
If you don't understand how the system works, go to New York. Or Shanghai, or London. Just try owning a car in one of those cities.
Wouldn't a more free-market solution be for the municipality to take the money that they would have used to provide broadband and offer it as a subsidy for anyone who is willing to provide broadband (with a set list of criteria and possibly a limited term for the subsidy)? This would encourage private companies (who we have seen time and again are more efficient at almost every type of business than government is) to provide the service. If the municipality wanted to, they could even form an independent non-profit organization to initially provide the service which would qualify them for the subsidy, provided other private businesses could still receive the subsidy if they later entered the market.
Can we jsut get community wide IT infrastructure labeled as public works please? During the New Deal era, were toll road operators suing to prevent the national highway system? The idea that we should worry about private enterprise profits at the cost of public works is retarded.
Good-bye
My company gets our internet to our servers via a small town utility... it is excellent service. I have a 15Mb/s fiber directly into the server room. At the same time, Verizon gives a few bundled T1's and tells us we should be grateful. We want more speed from them, and they tell us we would have to pay thousands and thousands to trench some fiber out to us. (we told them we would consider it, if we got to share revenue from ANYONE else that connected to that fiber that we would have paid for in our large business park, and they stopped talking to us).
Meanwhile, both verizon and charter are fighting hard to stop the utility from expanding service. They went into a neighbourhood, and started offering a few megabits for something like $25/month, which was enough for the utility to make a profit (they don't have to pay for lobbying, or for TV stations, etc). 75% of the residents in that neighbourhood switched within 2 months! Many paid the cancellation fees to get out of contracts, because the service was cheap, worked well, and actually gave the advertised speed.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
any group of people who band together and form a 'company' have the right to privately fuck all other people as they will. and, if they are not even wanting to come to your locale and screw you over privately - you shouldnt do anything - because their right to fuck you whenever they want, however they want should be preserved over what YOU want. crooked ? that's capitalism. until a capital owner decides to fuck you over, you people should just shut up and wait.
Read radical news here
Public hearings - local governments hold these for everything. Proposal to change the date for holding the public hearing on changing the amount of dues for sewage fees? Yeah, let's hold a hearing on that, too.
Financially separate operations - I'd honestly be angry if they weren't separate.
No below-cost service - Again, reasonable. Because doing so would either mean other tax money is being used, or that the government is borrowing to support it. Neither is good.
No borrowing without a referendum - A bit restrictive, but not too much so. Besides, since when has democracy been a bad thing?
I can easily imagine private companies being able to compete with this without absolutely dominating. Community broadband will likely be relatively slow - there's no incentive to go beyond what most people will use. A small business could probably work by providing higher-speed access at higher cost - those who want more speed will pay for it, but those who just need "good-enough" internet will be fine on community broadband.
Now, the one thing I am worried about is potential censorship. Certain highly-conservative communities might try to ban, say, pornography. Hyper-liberal communities might try to limit other things (a gaming curfew, similar to the recent Korean law, might be one of them). As far as I'm concerned, both are completely unacceptable. And also very likely to be tried - American politics tends to be very polarizing, even in homogeneous-party communities. I imagine most courts will throw the laws out, but you never know.
Another toolbag who didn't read the article, much less the summary beyond the first sentence. It does not prevent municipalities from creating community broadband. It requires them to get public input before getting involved and to set up the finances to reduce the chances of it becoming a money sink.
Do you seriously want to get your internet service from the government? If the local government provides the broadband, I guarantee no telco is going to bring in their own service and compete with something not under the same market controls they are. So by allowing this you are basically ensuring that your only choice is government supplied internet. If you're ok with that, then fine... I certainly agree that ISPs are pretty much shit nowadays... but replacing them with the government? I just dunno.
No, it's not a ban, in the same way that I'm not banned from parking in handicap spaces, it's just really unaffordable to pay all those tickets and those pesky impound fees.
What the bill does is make it unaffordable for municipalities to set up their own broadband. Keep in mind that these are small municipalities where the normal ISPs refuse to provide service.
Nice that you bring Finland in discussion - but in totally wrong way. The waste collection went wrong and there was abuse of the system, but those examples you cite are not problems with broadband when done right. And in Finland municipal broadband has been done right in many communities were there was no interest from commercial entities to build the infrastructure (and old phone companies went even so far that they teared town the old phone cables and installed GSM voicemail systems instead so that offering DSL wasn't even possible if someone would have wanted to take the risk; we have "must lease" clause in the law so that the last mile must be leased to competitor for "fair compensation" is the competitor wants to start operating DSL POP at the area). Communities (not necessarily even owned or operated by tows) build the infrastructure and offer ISPs to come to POPs with same terms for everyone and the end-user can choose which ISP to buy the actual service from. This solves the problem that ISPs don't have interes in areas where they might have just few customers at one POP and they still had to invest in everything.
Sweden went even further and built masses of fiber network for operators to lease - everyone with same terms. And last time I checked they were doing very well regarding broadband even in rural areas.
The idea is not to regulate anything but instead offer chance for businesses to enter the market (all with same terms) where they are not "naturally" interested because of the initial investment and risk of losing that investment (or some other bullshit/business reason).
Community broadband? More like COMMUNISM broadband. Thank God America still have some people like Bev Perdue to protect it from the reds.
Bev Purdue is a Democrat.
Prius sales aren't helped by their lack of availability. There was a month-long wait for one at my local dealership when I was looking at new cars a year ago, and I wasn't interested in waiting.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
I get your point, I really do. If you feel this way about property taxes, how do you feel about eminent domain? How do you feel about easements? What about squatter's rights?
Also, I know of medium-sized towns where every square inch of property in the town is owned by one family. Let me assure you these places are not bastions of freedom where the blessings of liberty apply to all. How would you feel if $some_trillionaire bought an entire state? An entire country?
Also, if the government (government, as in We the People, of by and for) doesn't ultimately control the land, then what is your claim to it? You say this is your acre of land? How? Oh, you paid someone for it? How did they get it? They paid someone for it, and so on? Hmm, Mr. Running Crow here says you've received stolen property, that he was driven off his land by force, by the Government. Just because you paid for stolen property doesn't mean you haven't committed the crime of receiving stolen property, else we'd have to let every professional fence out of jail.
Oh, you live in Europe? In say, Scotland? Clan MacDonald would like a word...
Thank you, Ms. Palin. Yes, you live in Alaska on land so barren no human being has ever laid claim to it, not even the Inuit? This land is yours because you got to it first? OK, so the Moon, or at least the Sea of Tranquility, belongs to the United States? How do you lay claim to this land? Did you make it?
Oh, you claim it because you have lived here so long, and your family has worked this land and has fought for it. Fought for it by serving in the government's army, you mean?
You've stumbled into an old, old argument the philosophers have been chewing over for literally thousands of years. Ultimately, it boils down to this. You own this land by agreement. This is your land because everyone else in the group agrees it is, and if they don't, then the best you have is a house under siege. The ability to demand, defend and grant rights over real estate is in fact referred to as sovereignty, and that is a function of government. Those few individuals on Earth who can claim that they own this land, and can back that claim up without appealing to some other authority, are referred to as "kings."
Like it or not, "private property ownership" is a function of government. Ultimately, this is your land because the guys with the most and biggest guns say it is. The only other logically consistent argument is the one Thomas Paine espoused, basically that no one can claim to own any part of a world that they had no hand in creating.
Yeah, I know, this means Ayn Rand was a spoiled little rich girl who sat around bemoaning the loss of the family fortune and smoking crack. Shocking, I know.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."