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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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
This isn't a competitive industry. I'm sorry, but I'm not sure where you got the idea that internet service was competitive. Somebody owns the wires going to your house, and they get to charge whatever they like for that knowing that there are at most one or two other options.
Around here the mayor wanted to do something like this 6 years ago and was told by Qwest that they'd be doing something about the problem in the near future. Well, it's 6 years later, the infrastructure still sucks and Qwest hasn't done jack shit about it. They just keep taking people's money because we don't have other options. Comcast managing to be even worse than Qwest.
When you take into consideration the fact that these towns weren't profitable to provide service in the first place, I'm really curious as to what the justification for pretending that treating broadband as a utility is so bad.
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.
Ha! The potholes, the bridge collapses, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Economist, and pretty much anyone that has ever seen a road in the United States, knows that that America's transit infrastructure, it's roads, it's mass transit, everything is shit. Yes, it was once the envy of the world, but that sixty years ago.
While it is true that roads are paid for with gas an vehicle taxes and fees, the amount of revenue being generated under the current regime is demonstrably insufficient, and has been for decades. After 30 years of repeated tax cuts, with increased demand for basic services, we do have a self-imposed revenue problem.
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."