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Tennessee Could Give Taxpayers America's Fastest Internet For Free, But It Gave Comcast and AT&T $45 Million Instead (vice.com)
Chattanooga, Tennessee is home to some of the fastest internet speeds in the United States, offering city dwellers Gbps and 10 Gpbs connections. Instead of voting to expand those connections to the rural areas surrounding the city, which have dial up, satellite, or no internet whatsoever, Tennessee's legislature voted to give Comcast and AT&T a $45 million taxpayer handout. Motherboard reports: The situation is slightly convoluted and thoroughly infuriating. EPB -- a power and communications company owned by the Chattanooga government -- offers 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 10 Gpbs internet connections. A Tennessee law that was lobbied for by the telecom industry makes it illegal for EPB to expand out into surrounding areas, which are unserved or underserved by current broadband providers. For the last several years, EPB has been fighting to repeal that state law, and even petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to try to get the law overturned. This year, the Tennessee state legislature was finally considering a bill that would have let EPB expand its coverage (without providing it any special tax breaks or grants; EPB is profitable and doesn't rely on taxpayer money). Rather than pass that bill, Tennessee has just passed the "Broadband Accessibility Act of 2017," which gives private telecom companies -- in this case, probably AT&T and Comcast -- $45 million of taxpayer money over the next three years to build internet infrastructure to rural areas.
Making legislated monopolies great again!
Government working for it's constituents at the finest.
Making corporations all-powerful and unstoppable... by placing the GOP in power, voters have assured themselves of many years of getting boned by corporations getting their way. Golf clap for a master job the GOP did getting people to vote against their own best interests. Bravo, my friends.
This is what happens when you let one party have a complete stranglehold on state government. The number of Republicans in the state senate are almost 6 to 1 in favor of Republicans. It's almost 3-1 in favor of Republicans in the state house. The governor in Republican and there's no accountability. Voters have shown consistently that the vast majority of them only care about whether a D or R is next to a candidate's name and everything else is negotiable. I'm sure we'll get a few "Throw the bums out" posts, but that's not going to happen. Most of the state governments in the southeastern USA have sizable Republican majorities. I've seen corrupt practices out of the Democrats too when they had strangleholds on states with huge majorities in the state legislature. It's what happens when one party gets entrenched and there's no hope of getting them out.
I know the intent of the article is to make people enraged, and it certainly seems like something's going wrong here.
However, I have serious, fundamental reservations about government competing with the free market.
While certainly there are some circumstances, and this may well be one, where government can beneficially 'manage the commons' better than private or for-profit interests, there's something troubling about government agencies, on taxpayer funds, driving private firms out of business.
Yes, I see from the article that EPB runs a profit, and doesn't take tax money for operation. But do they bear the long-term capital costs that a private firm would for infrastructure? They certainly get use of city right-of-ways, no? In disputes over land use or zoning, I have to imagine they get a far more sympathetic hearing from city agencies?
In any case, it should be in the interest of any citizen to doubt the wisdom of establishing and protecting anti-competitive markets in the long run, not to mention the idea of a business having (essentially) the power of law enforcement on their side.
http://reason.com/archives/201...
-Styopa
Maybe if Democrats weren't relentlessly pushing for bigger government and SJW victimhood identity politics they could compete with Republicans.
But they chose a relentless drive for power and pushing the culture war over policies Americans actually want. Democrats deliberately pushed "blue dogs" out of the party so progressives could control it to-to-bottom. Democrats backed Bloomberg on civilian disarmament, backed Soros and Steyer on funding #BlackLivesmatter, insisted a man changing his name magically made him a woman, and then wonder why ordinary Americans no longer vote for them.
And really, where are Republicans stopping Democrats in such paradisaical deep blue enclaves like Chicago and Detroit?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/