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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
Just like States can impose restrictions on where you pee.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Arrest anyone that tries to shut it off.
At the very least, service should keep running until someone else provides service. It's not as if Comcast is going to provide service within anyone's lifetime just because Greenlight stops.
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.
Blame North Carolina for passing a bad law. The courts did no more than affirm the states' right to regulate their municipalities.
While you're at it, blame Wilson for overreaching. They could have made a case for installing basic infrastructure (fiber optic cable, no different than roads) and then leasing it by the strand to individuals and businesses to connect to the Internet provider of their choice. And invited providers to enter the market and compete, now with the ease-of-entry facilitated by last-mile infrastructure. Instead they made the same bad decision most municipalities make: run a municipal Internet service with no direct access to the cable for other purposes.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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"?
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Except that the typical voter doesn't know this is happening or doesn't care. There's also a big notion in the south that the courts must not get involved in politics, while at the same time politics ensures that bad laws can never be overturned. US Congress could act here, as this is basically interstate commerce that's involved. But they're bought and paid for just as much as the South Carolina legislators.
You can IMAGINE whatever you want. As to voting out their legislators, consider that this is one single issue, and not one that is very prominent on the radar of most of the state's voters. As far as I can see, it only affects a very small number of citizens in one single town.
It's the same principle as the US Congress. Anyone with two brain cells to connect together knows that on the whole they are a bunch of rat bastards, but hardly anyone has a problem with HIS OWN PARTICULAR representative.
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.
Leaving aside the "OH NOES! TAXES!" BS, the statement you quote never suggests that supplying Internet access is "charitable" or "unprofitable". It says "the majority of the area does not present enough profitability to attract the private-sector investment", not "the majority of the area does not present profit to attract the private-sector investment".
The private sector generally doesn't invest in projects to make small amounts of profit, especially if they're expensive. There are many, many, examples of projects that would more than pay for themselves that you'll never see the private sector take an interest in, because the promise of a 10% return here for a medium risk is unattractive compared to the promise of 100% there, for little or no risk.
As for taxes, I personally like paying taxes. As a wise man once said, in return I get civilization.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... 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 .
This court decision is not binding on the state of North Carolina. The Sixth Circuit covers Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. North Carolina is in the Fourth Circuit. Decisions in other circuits are merely persuasive authority, not binding. Only the Supreme Court can do that.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
Each municipality should have an independent company that works in partnership with the other. With a minimal of overhead, they will be able to sidestep state law.
Preventing competition via laws/government/regulations is not a free market. It is Mercantilism/Corporitism.
leather-dog muksihs
Blog: @muksihs
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.
The US has never, for a second, had a free market economy any larger than a farmer's market.
The National Guard is busy in Charlotte, there will be no one around to stop the riot!