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Kansas To Nix Expansion of Google Fiber and Municipal Broadband
symbolset writes: "Consumerist, among others, is reporting on a Kansas bill to restrict municipal support of broadband expansion. Purportedly to ensure a 'level playing field' to encourage commercial expansion in this area, these bills are usually referred to as oligopoly protection acts. Everywhere they have been implemented expansion of new broadband technology stops. In this specific case no municipal entity in Kansas will be able to enter the same sort of agreements that enabled Google Fiber. From the bill:
Except with regard to unserved areas, a municipality may not, directly or indirectly:
(1) Offer to provide to one or more subscribers, video, telecommunications or broadband service; or
(2) purchase, lease, construct, maintain or operate any facility for the purpose of enabling a private business or entity to offer, provide, carry, or deliver video, telecommunications or broadband service to one or more subscribers."
Except with regard to unserved areas, a municipality may not, directly or indirectly:
(1) Offer to provide to one or more subscribers, video, telecommunications or broadband service; or
(2) purchase, lease, construct, maintain or operate any facility for the purpose of enabling a private business or entity to offer, provide, carry, or deliver video, telecommunications or broadband service to one or more subscribers."
Darn, I'm sure Google was excited by the prospect of providing broadband access to the tens of people who live in municipalities in Kansas.
Freedom for Oligarchs. Higher prices for you.
Google needs to spend more time buying^h^h^h^h^h^h talking to legislators. It sucks that this is how it works nor, but government is for the people withe the most power and money, and with corporate personhood, this is how it rolls.
Silence is a state of mime.
I love subsection b of Section 2. Quote:
encourage the development and widespread use of technological advances in providing video, telecommunications and broadband services at competitive rates; and
That will never happen. Under no circumstances will people be able to get any of those services at competitive rates. What they will get are high prices for slow speeds.
Looks like Verizon/Comcast/whomever was successful in bribing Kansas State House members into bringing this bill up for consideration.
Gotta love fascism. Nothing like getting shafted by the government AND private industry.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What's so hard to understand?
Municipalities should own infrastructure.
We have a situation where the roads of the future are privately owned, gated, and tolled. The rest of the world is preparing to steamroller over you.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
..don't panic
Imagine every transport company building their own road system, and what that would do to competition, and prices.
In other words, companies should not be able to have direct control over basic infrastructure. That's what we (should) have a government for.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Communism and Capitalism both have some things in common. Not only do they both begin with the letter C, but they are both "great ideas" and neither ever actually happen.
Every time I see a story about a municipality taking their lack of development and progress into their own hands, some previously uninterested party steps in and says, "This is my territory and you can't build where we don't want to build." On its face it's ridiculous. They want to cherry pick -- to invest in the markets which offer the best returns. We all get that. But to deny anyone else the opportunity to operate in less favored zones is 100% anti-competitive and 100% anti-capitalist. Trying to keep other parties from participating in the marketplace takes the free out of free markets.
I think it's about time there were some public hearings on the situation so that we can get them to say things they don't mean and can later be held to account on.
I think the bill is a bad idea, but I don't think it would stop Google from deploying fiber elsewhere in Kansas. It doesn't do anything to prevent deployments, it just prevents municipalities from offering the special treatment that helped get KC selected as the first city out of 1100 candidates.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Because AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc didn't get any government assistance to build their networks....http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/07/att_verizon_get_most_federal_a.html
Perhaps if they pray really hard, God will create a super fast broadband network for them.
They'll need to pray harder than the lobbyists who wrote this bill.
The law of unintended consequences... While Section 3b, in regards to "video services", makes clear reference to "through wireline facilities located at least in part in the public rights-of-way", and clearly is about cable tv (no thread to netflicks for example), 3d is a very different animal:
(d) "Telecommunications service" means the two-way transmission of
signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, messages, data or other
information of any nature by wire, radio, light waves or other
electromagnetic means, offered to the public generally.
Hmm...does not seem to be based on actual broadband service providers or any specific limitations. The way it is written would seem to exclude any form of VoIP or chat "service" (jabber, skype, etc)!!!! WTF?! Way to go Kansas!
And Google doing this is any different from any other company who demands and/or extracts concessions from the local municipality in exchange for opening a business there? Exemptions such as no taxes for the duration of its existence, exemptions to zoning laws, exemptions to local pollution standards, etc etc?
At least Google's concessions are largely unharmful to the local community, and the end result is actually fostering competition in an area that's normally a monopoly. Imagine that....local government fighting monopoly, by fostering competition.
After all...who does the government serve? The local monopolistic telco? Or the local citizens' public interest?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Let's give this an honest name shall we. Why don't we call these bills Protect Oligopoly Results Kineticly act - or PORK acts. The only thing these bills do is protect the business model of existing oligopolies and prevent competition. They are inherently anti-capitalist and have no place in the US (or anywhere else in my opinion).
Competition is a wonderful thing and those countries that have competition have much better service for much better prices and their companies still make quite a bit of money.
Kansans mustn't have broadband, they might gain forbidden knowledge.
Nope, no closed minded bigotry here....
The bill is by "The committee on commerce" which looks to be... http://www.kslegislature.org/li/b2013_14/committees/ctte_s_cmrce_1/
You might want to contact them. We all know where / how this bill got it's start. You need to voice your opinion and remind them who they really serve.
I've been observing this sort of greedy corporatism for years. We seriously need to first set up a nationally recognized, "voluntary" standard that at least four competing broadband providers should be available in each jurisdiction and then start a national nonprofit organization that relentlessly pressures non-compliant local and state governments into abolishing laws and regulations that discourage or outright prevent this kind of minimum coverage. Constant lawsuits that dig up dirt about payoffs to politicians and expose semi-monopolies would be an excellent idea as well. It may be a little early to truly establish the idea that universal access to low-cost, high-speed Internet communications is a basic human right, but it's a good propaganda tool.
I'm a dreaming fanatic about free markets, but we don't have free markets for broadband Internet access. We have utterly corrupt corporatism. It's high time to savagely fight back against the greedy parasites at Time Warner and Cox and the rest who absolutely hate the idea of having to give up their bloated, government-protected profits.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Then again, maybe the politicians just don't even bother trying to have a cover story anymore, because they know we already consider them all nothing but self-serving asshats, yet the majority will still vote them back into office again and again and again.
The only way things will change is to always vote out the incumbent. Every time. Even if you agree with 100% of their positions and votes. Lets spend a few election cycles churning up the sludge. Maybe some of them will get the hint, and maybe some better people will see that they have a shot at getting in, once the old-boy network has been rattled to pieces.
Then again, maybe the politicians just don't even bother trying to have a cover story anymore, because they know we already consider them all nothing but self-serving asshats, yet the majority will still vote them back into office again and again and again.
This... most people think 'their' representative(s) are not that bad, it's the others that suck, so they vote theirs in again. All a politician has to do is sell himself to his constituents on a few issues, say look at what I have done for you (if an incumbent or holder of other political positions), and smear everyone else into oblivion. It gets lapped up, and the cycle repeats ad nauseum.
Silence is a state of mime.
It is quite humourous that normally when people hold wacky beliefs - beliefs that have no evidence and defy common sense - are labeled "kooks"; but as soon as they identify themselves as "Christian", we have to treat those beliefs with respect.
Hix Nix Quix Netflix.
munis didn't fund wars... nice try though
Maybe not... but spending by Munis is also not responsible for the vast majority of US public debt. As of 2012 (the latest year-end I can find data for without logging into Bloomberg and compiling the data):
US local government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 7-8%.
US state government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 19-20%.
US federal government debt as a percentage of GDP was a touch over 120%.
So, by far the biggest contributor to US public debt is the US Federal Government, and by far the biggest single-ticket item of its expenditure is military spending ($700 Billion per year in direct contract awards), with massive spending on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most thorough study that I can find public reference to is by Brown University, which puts the cost of troop deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and logistical support in Pakistan, plus domestic spending on debt interest to service that cost, at something over $6 Trillion so far, and that is only since 2003.
The study itself does not seem to be publicly available on the interwebs - Crawford, Neta and Catherine Lutz. "Economic and Budgetary Costs of the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to the United States: A Summary". Costs of War. Brown University.
But you can check out the Wikipedia article to get the basics: Financial cost of the Iraq War
Seeing as the current US Federal Debt burden is somewhere between $17 and $17.5 Trillion, the "non-War" debt burden is still a not-inconsiderable $11 Trillion, but the annual Military Gravy Train in the US dwarfs the rest of the debt components.
He had time to deal with the cataracts of Sam's mom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZeWPScnolo
English is not this
No willful ignorance in order to maintain a vague sense of political correctness here. Please do try to convince the class why Kansas and other such places don't deserve the hard time they get for their high density of bible thumpers.
How about for the same reason that poor children in the inner cities don't deserve the "hard time" they get for their high density of gang bangers and drug dealers?
of the market at work, not God! Except when it is not.
All these companies bleat and cry every time they might get regulated even a little, yet will lobby for these sort of laws to increase their profitability.
WWJD? Pretty sure he would dickpunch the lot of them.
You do understand google is paying for it.. The only thing they asked for was access to public right of ways, which would be required for any line based provider to get access to, and in exchange they provided free internet to public buildings, including schools.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
The law is horrible in many ways. The three that stand out to me:
1) Municipalities are allowed to engage in broadband efforts ONLY if 9 out of 10 homes in a census block have no broadband. This means that the big ISPs can wire up 11% of homes and call it a day. The other 89%? Too bad, but you guys aren't profitable enough to care about.
2) Satellite and mobile is counted as broadband. Never mind that satellite would be hideously expensive or that mobile can have tiny caps compared to wired broadband. In fact, it doesn't matter if the ISP is going to charge you $200 a month for 1GB of access. That's considered available access and you can't launch a municipal broadband effort.
3) This bill was literally written by the big ISPs who don't want competition from Google Fiber and municipal broadband. So the cries of "this will increase competition" are out-and-out lies. This is all about protecting the profits of the big ISPs by preventing municipalities from serving the non-served. The ISPs are afraid that, if municipalities are able to do this by themselves, they won't give lots of cash to Verizon, etc to build and run out networks. (Which those ISPs can then pocket, not build the networks, and lobby to keep them from having to uphold their end of the deal.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Your concluding statement isn't accurate at all.
The "mandatory" spending on entitlement programs dwarfs military spending: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
We have a spending problem, but it's not limited just to the military budget, and it is simply not true to say that the military spending "dwarfs" the rest of the debt components. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite.
This has a nice visual breakdown of federal income and outlay: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Also, refer to the GAO's citizen's report for FY 2012: http://www.fms.treas.gov/fr/12... chart 3 is a nice pie chart representation of spending, please note that for FY 2012 HHS and SSA together ("entitlement spending") were 45% of the total federal budget, military spending was 21%, 30% if you include the VA.
Yes, we need to cut military spending and reduce our involvement in foreign conflicts, but that's just one part of the work that needs to be done. We need to reduce spending in all of these areas.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
We had the same thing happen here a couple of years ago. Oconee county got fed up with the broadband players' reluctance to hook up rural parts of the county, so they decided to go in with the Feds to roll out universal fiber to all, because of the economic implications of such..
In response, AT&T objected, said they had planned on universal coverage, and lobbied the State for a "level playing field" law that would prohibit hooking residences up to any publicly funded infrastructure where the same subsidies were not given to AT&T and other private carriers.
The day the bill was signed into Law, the AT&T CEO declared wireline infrastructure dead, and that not one more penny would be sunk into wireline expansion in South Carolina.
Perhaps if they pray really hard, God will create a super fast broadband network for them.
I suspect God has bigger things to deal with than internet connections. But it doesnt hurt to try....
Considering that if God exists, he does so outside of space and time. So he could theoretically have time for everything, because time has no meaning to him.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Have you seen the scale of rates being charged? They are charging $300 for the fiber install, which they are even willing to finance at 0% interest over a year ($25 a month!), and if you do nothing else, you get a FREE 5 Mbps connection. If you opt for the full connection, they waive the install fee, and then give you 1 GBps down AND up for $70. In addition, they are providing free gigabit service to schools, libraries and hospitals.
And what is the city giving in return? An expedited permit process, and only charging half as much per pole to connect. How is this a bad deal for the city or it's constituents?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Thanks ALEC(American Leglislative Exchange Council)
Thanks Google, for joining ALEC and legitamizing Americas' true Shadow Government.
Thanks to all the State legislatures bought and paid for by ALEC
American land of the "free"(TM), home of the cowering masses of consumers beholden to mega-corporations.
Perhaps if they pray really hard, God will create a super fast broadband network for them.
They'll need to p(r)ay harder than the lobbyists who wrote this bill.
There, I fixed that for you.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
Actually, as a non-believer I have to concede that 'god exists outside of [our] space and time' is one of the more reasonable and rational statements you could make. If God created the universe then he must necessarily have existed outside the spacetime he just created. Now, any statements as to how his "spacetime analogue" and our own may interact start treading on much more tenuous ground, but the basic assertion is necessarily valid.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.