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Appeals Court Decision Kills North Carolina Town's Gigabit Internet (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: In early August, the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled the FCC had no authority to prevent states from imposing restrictions on municipal internet. This was a result of the FCC stepping in last year in an effort to "remove barriers to broadband investment and competition." However, the courts sided with the states, which said that the FCC's order impeded on state rights. In the end, this ruling clearly favored firmly entrenched big brand operators like Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and ATT, which lobbied hard to keep competition at bay. The federal ruling specifically barred municipal internet providers from offering service outside of their city limits, denying them from providing service to under-served communities. The fallout from the federal court's rejection of the FCC order to extend a lifeline to municipal internet providers has claimed another victim. The small community of Pinetops, North Carolina -- population 1,300 -- will soon have its gigabit internet connection shut off. Pinetops has been the recipient of Greenlight internet service, which is provided by the neighboring town of Wilson. The town of Wilson has been providing electric power to Pinetops for the past 40 years, and had already deployed fiber through the town in order to bolster its smart grid initiative. What's infuriating to the Wilson City Council and to the Pinetop residents that will lose their high-speed service is that the connections are already in place. There's no logical reason why they should be cut off, but state laws and the lobbyists supporting those laws have deemed what Greenlight is doing illegal. Provide power to a neighboring town -- sure that's OK. Provide better internet to a neighboring town -- lawsuit
Arrest anyone that tries to shut it off.
Don't blame the states, blame the big corporations and blame us for looking the other way while we got to the situation, where $2.6 billion of reported lobbying (bribery) donations are given to the House and Senate every year.
An European here cannot comprehend what's preventing creating a Pinetop Municipal Broadband Company which will provide the connection to locals and contractually buying bandwidth/network and other related services from the Wilson guys?
In the end, this ruling clearly favored firmly entrenched big brand operators like Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and ATT, which lobbied hard to keep competition at bay.
Can we just call a spade a spade, and treat "lobbying" as a bribe? I'm getting sick of seeing this blatant corruption.
Is this basically the state saying to its people "fuck you, you can't have good internet because it's not sold by our buddies who would rip you off if they could be bothered, but they can't. So again, fuck you"?
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So you thini there's somehow a natural right for some private entity to be given access to infrastructure they did not build so they can make a profit because...I can't even make up a because here.
There is no right of privitization. Despite what conservatives think, capitalism is not enshrined in our Constitution and if we the people decide we want to provide something absent some fatcats making money off of it then that is our right.
I'll grant that shouldn't be done in haste, but no justification is needed. In this case there's plenty of justification. Cable and telecomm companies these days do nothing but engage in rent seeking behavior and holding back progress.
North Carolina is wrong and the court is wrong. In all the furor over states' rights everyone is forgetting peoples' rights.
Now, in a large screw you gesture to the vastly corrupt and totally owned by corporate interests North Carolina state government, what ought to happen here is that the people in these towns should form a non profit company in which they all own equal shares. They can elect a board to run it, get tax rebates and gifts from their governments for startup money just like billionaire sports team owners get who don't want to pay their own business expenses, and run the thing the way it's being run right now. Of course the company would have in its charter a prohibition on ever being sold to a for profit entity.
I have plenty of problems with my own particular representative thank you very much. My whole life I've been 'represented' by corporate friendly religious pandering stooges whose opinions for the most part couldn't be more opposite to my own.
Every time a bad law is debated or one of these corporate giveaways like TPP comes up, I already know how my particular useless waste of flesh will vote on it without even looking. I just ask myself what vote would be in favor of actual human citizens and sure enough he'll vote the opposite.
What a bunch of libertarian infantile bullshit, starting with the 'taxes are coercion' crap and ending with the usual selfish 'it's being spent on something I personally disapprove of and therefore is morally wrong because reasons' type argument.
First off, jackass, people form governments to, you know, govern. Providing essential services has been a government function since before the founding of this country even though libertarians love to rewrite history in their deluded brains to pretend it isn't.
One really can't function economically without Internet access in today's society. The corporate monopolists you seem to have no issue with can't be bothered to even go rip these people off, but they bought a law to make people solving their own problems in a clever manner illegal because they're afraid that people in areas that they do rip off will get ideas.
Where I live I have one cable company to 'choose' from. I also get natural gas from a city owned utility. Guess which entity provides responsive service at a reasonable price? If the gas utility were private, the only thing that would change is my prices would go up because of profits and my service would go down, kind of like what happened when our electric utility which had been owned by a reasonably small company got bought out by an aggressive rent seeking corporation. Their behavior of course is to raise prices and defer maintenance such that when we had a minor brush with the edge of a hurricane recently there were massive outages that went on for days as their crumbling ill maintained infrastructure couldn't handle it.
You want coercion, it's being forced to pay money to monopolists and oligarchs. Some businesses have competition, none of them welcome it. All of them do whatever they can to be rid of it. At least with government I get a vote.
... you will have to choose between the Law and Morals.
I have a friend who gets very angry when he talks about Morals; he has no qualms about the concept that the Law must followed however terrible the consequences. He's otherwise a very balanced person.
IMHO the Law is a tool which we produced to help us live in harmony; if it is used to damage the interests of the people, one has to question if that tool is working well according to the original intent (aka the "Spirit of the Law") -- reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law .
Councils don't build roads and then lease them to toll operators; they don't install mains water pipes and lease them to a 'water operator': Operating the whole service is the point of council: There are 2 exceptions for civil infrastructure; electricity and communications. Electricity isn't so bad since it is tightly regulated once it leaves the provider's sub-station. In hindsight, it was wrong of councils to outsource communication infrastructure, which has created the very mess councils are now mired in. Modern communications is a shit-can where the provider can install, or not, what they want, charge what they like, then pay protection money to state politicians for reduced competition.
Meaning the states can forbid councils from building roads or installing mains water services. Either companies sue for privatization of these services, or councils sue for giving communication providers preferential treatment.
Based on that flawed logic, most of the rural US would still be lacking power and phone service. Rural communities using taxes to establish essential utilities is a long standing tradition in this nation and is a big part of what has made this country so strong.. Libertarians have some great ideas but usually take them too far.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Libertarians actually don't have some great ideas. It is the ideology of the two digit IQs.
Blame the politicians for taking bribes, or being influenced by deep pocket corporations. People can demand these monopoly laws be removed, the voting record of the state politicians is a matter of public record so you know who to blame. Politicians only get away with this corruption because the voters don't care. Also spin off the municipal broadband as a private corporation and they can keep it running.
Municipal broadband affects the inter-state commerce of internet service, it changes the price in the national market. This means the federal government can use the inter-state commerce law to regulate it (this is the same reasoning they used to regulate people growing marijuana for personal use)..
How in the fcuk did this comment get modded as insightful? Out of the three you got 1 right.
Don't blame the States - Wrong, blame the States, it is the States (as through it's elected officials) that is taking the bribes (meaning the 'legal' lobbying).
Blame the big corporation - Correct.
Blame us- Wrong. The corruption of politics is so complete that if you believe your vote counts for anything then you are delusional.
I think it's because doctors don't approve laws for doctors, but politicians approve laws for politicians.