Nearly Half of Colorado Counties Have Rejected a Comcast-Backed Law Restricting City-Run Internet (vice.com)

bumblebaetuna shares a report from Motherboard: In Tuesday's Coordinated Election, two Colorado counties voted on ballot measures to exempt themselves from a state law prohibiting city-run internet services. Both Eagle County and Boulder County voters approved the measures, bringing the total number of Colorado counties that have rejected the state law to 31 -- nearly half of the state's 64 counties. Senate Bill 152 -- which was lobbied for by Big Telecom -- became law in Colorado in 2005, and prohibits municipalities in the state from providing city-run broadband services.

Some cities prefer to build their own broadband network, which delivers internet like a utility to residents, and is maintained through subscription costs. But ever since SB 152 was enacted, Colorado communities have to first bring forward a ballot measure asking voters to exempt the area from the state law before they can even consider starting a municipal broadband service. So that's what many of them have done. In addition to the 31 counties that have voted to overrule the state restrictions, dozens of municipalities in the state have also passed similar ballot measures. Including cities, towns, and counties, more than 100 communities in Colorado have pushed back against the 12-year-old prohibition, according to the Institute for Local Self Reliance.

Comments

Re:That's odd

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Because the legal power to force you to pay for a service whether you want it or not is not competition? If a private concern did that, you'd rightfully howl.

Are you going to exempt people who continue to buy the better private service? What? Nooo?

What surprise!

To give you a hint of what's to come, Detroit Metro airport built a massive new parking structure, staffed it, and nobody came. Private shuttle services to lots a mile or more away were more than worth it. So the government passed a "government is inefficient" 30% tax on those lots, and still had problems.

Meanwhile, out state people who drove in to the airport the night before their flight and stayed in airport hotels would leave their cars in the hotel lots when they left the next day, with the hotel's blessing.

Nope! That was made illegal too. Because the government cannot compete in legitimate business. They must cheat and put their thumb on the scale and skimp and finally outlaw the competition which outdoes them in spite of all that.

That is why it isn't competition.

Re:Did the communities actually build a network?

[elistan]

It's one thing to huff and puff, it's another to take action. Did these communities that "rejected Comcast" actually build their own networks, or are they still using the service that they supposedly rejected?

The communities did not reject Comcast - they voted in favor of allowing the city to provide Internet access (alongside all existing providers.) It's now up to the city to put together a plan to fund and provide that access, and get approval for that plan. In Longmont COs case, once the city voted to exempt itself from the ban, the city proposed floating a bond to fund the build-out, which was approved by the city in yet another vote. The city then did in fact built out a gigabit fiber service. And it's awesome.

Re:Love-hate relationship with the irony

[blindseer]

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

This discussion led me to go look up the Tenth Amendment Center website. They are certainly big on letting people shoot and smoke all they want. If you think that the "war on some drugs" is just something to prop up the prison industry then what do you think of the "war on some guns"? I believe that it's going to be hard to tell people that they can smoke what they can grow but not shoot what they can build. If you think it's silly for someone to go to prison for three years for growing a common weed then would it not also be silly to put someone in prison for playing in their garage with some scrap metal?

What is this "bump stock" that so many congresscritters want to ban now? It's a piece of plastic on a threaded pipe, that's about it. What's a "silencer"? According to the ATF it can be a piece of metal that's got male threads on one end and female threads on the other, as in it can fit a common oil filter to the end of a rifle barrel. What is a "machine gun"? According to the ATF it can be something as simple as a length of string with a loop on each end, people have actually got these "machine guns" registered with the ATF.

I believe that what we've been seeing happen with federal drug laws will soon also happen with federal gun laws. It appears I'm not the only one. I went to the Tenth Amendment Center website and found a couple interesting recent articles on this debate over federal control on guns and drugs. I know lots of Slashdot readers don't like Second Amendment advocacy groups like the NRA, but if you are not a fan of federal prohibitions on marijuana possession then you need to have a different attitude on the NRA. The legal constructs that prohibit marijuana possession are the same constructs that prohibit the possession of silencers. If one goes then so does the other.

Here's just one example explaining this connection between gun laws and drug laws, the connection is the Tenth Amendment.
http://tenthamendmentcenter.co...

There is one important distinction though between gun laws and drug laws, gun laws have an additional amendment in the US Constitution that makes them problematic while drug laws do not. If you believe that Colorado can "go rogue" on drug laws and expect a federal ban on bump stocks to hold up in court then I believe you will be disappointed in the long run.