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A State-By-State Guide To Restrictive Community Broadband Laws
blottsie writes On Tuesday, President Obama will unveil a dramatic push to improve broadband Internet service for people around the country through community-built municipal broadband networks. Problem is, state legislatures around the country have passed laws making it considerably more difficult for these public Internet projects to get off the ground. In some states, building municipal broadband is prohibited altogether. This piece dives into the state laws standing between us and more competitive Internet service markets.
>> deep-pocketed government entities from undercutting a private sector unable to keep up
Funniest thing I read all day.
It means you'd have to get a majority of your neighbors to vote for internet, and in the deep south that kind of collectivism just isn't going to happen except in one of them there big liberal cities, and the big cities have probably already signed exclusive contracts with the cable company.
These laws have been passed because certain municipalities have been able to successfully cover the cost and maintenance of their own networks.
Laws prohibiting municipal broadband are entirely anti-city. In a country where politics is such that cities are routinely decried (while ironically states redistribute their tax revenues to rural areas and suburbs), I think it is time to frame broadband rights as a freedom from government for cities.
Cities should be allowed to be more independent from the states that hold them. They should not be stripped of the competitive advantages that localized economies of scale provide. They should be allowed to offer their own utilities, to toll the interstates that cut through them, and they shouldn't have to pay a gasoline tax that largely serves rural interests, and above all, part of that independence should be to allow them to offer broadband.
This is my sig.
It means that completely inept local bureaucrats can squander tax money, run up debt and leave you with a marginally functional broadband service that gets sold to comcast for a dime on the dollar.
educate yourself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
then form an opinion
do you honestly believe that if government wasn't there the big guys would fade away? with weak government, the power vacuum is filled even more by plutocrats. they *want* a weak government. without government you think monopolies don't or won't exist? less government means less *regulation*, they gobble up more, you get less choice buddy. and you get less legal recourse from being shafted
what you want, if you follow through on the coherent thought, is less corruption, not a weaker government that is even yet more beholden to money. not possible? study the laws on corruption in the nordic countries, you know, those evil socialist horrors that are actually richer, happier, and more upwardly mobile meritocracies than the usa pretends it is, but is rapidly losing with a shrinking middle class and corrupt congresswhores beholden to the financial powers that less government unleashes even more
good luck kid escaping the bullshit mythology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
After finding that wonderful article on rent seeking (although you still don't seem to understand that "rent seeking" is a failure of government, not markets), I suggest you look up the articles on "regulatory capture" and "public choice theory". More regulation is the primary mechanism by which "plutocrats" engage in rent seeking and create monopolies, and politicians and government employees invariably support them in that effort, not because they are bad people (most of them are quite well meaning), but because that's the way such systems function.
Government is responsible for creating artificial monopolies. So, "without government" there wouldn't be any artificial monopolies. Would we be dragged into a quagmire of natural monopolies if government got completely out of the business of regulating markets? Nobody knows for certain because it has never been tried, but given what we know, it seems very unlikely.
Take it from an ex-northern European: you don't know what you're talking about. I suggest you read "The Almost Nearly Perfect People" by Booth. Northern Europe is neither socialist, nor a meritocracy, nor particularly successful. And even if it were any of those things, we couldn't implement the Nordic model in the US.