NC Governor Allows Anti-Community-Broadband Law 356
zerocore writes "North Carolina governor Bev Perdue will not veto a bill that will limit small town municipalities' ability to create community broadband when private industry will not go there. 'The governor said there is a need to establish rules to prevent cities and towns from having unfair advantage over private companies. But she said she was concerned that the bill would decrease the number of choices available to consumers. The bill would require towns and cities that set up broadband systems to hold public hearings, financially separate their operations from the rest of government operations, and bar from them offering below cost services. They also couldn't borrow money for the project without voter approval in a referendum.'"
Open Source Broadband (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the Open Source crowd figuring a way to deliver broadband for free or close to free? Why not!
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it isn't. Even if it is just what the summary says, you have to adjust for the fact that the person who says it is almost certain to believe that any time the government provides a service at any price that it drives businesses out of business clear across the country.
I fail to see how communities creating their own broad band in areas where commercial ISPs aren't willing to create the service is going to create an unfair advantage to those communities. The main motivation behind the bill is pandering to a greedy and incompetent telecommunications industry.
If there were some reasonable hope of commercial ISPs going there, then yes this might be a problem. But I live in Seattle and we're likely to have to go this route because the ISPs refuse to provide us with decent affordable service. I'm fairly lucky where I live to only have to pay $50 a month and have the privilege of getting 5mbps for that, whereas in other parts of the country it's trivial to get 40mbps for $55 a month.
I think that if we were going to do it, these sorts of regulations would make some sense, but even there if the community is making a broad band network that works, I fail to see why we need commercial ISPs at all.
But its ok for an unfair advantage for companies? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am so sick of seeing this happen. The municipal wifi project in my town was canceled by time warner. The end result was that 3 years later there is still no public wifi downtown, half of the surrounding neighborhoods still dont have coverage for anything but dial up and the people living here have exactly 1 choice for internet. My cable/internet bill is $178 a month for basic cable and 5/1 internet service.
Re:Open Source Broadband (Score:2, Interesting)
Even if bandwidth is close to free, the hardware to control it, and network connections aren't.
Re:Ummm (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a big fan of private business, but this is akin to the laws that prevent the government from competing with private business for anything - so instead of having electronic tax filing provided for free at the IRS site, we have to pay a private entity to do the filing for us. The IRS still has to have a back end paid for with tax money.
Re:Ummm (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that it's anticompetitive to run the service using tax dollars. If Business A (run by the city) is tax subsidized, then nobody will choose Business B's service. If they did, they would have to pay Business B more for the same service even though they're already essentially paying Business A through their taxes. This pretty much ensures that Business B will never expand service to that area, even if it would have been profitable otherwise.
If you instead do what this bill appears to propose, then the city government can ensure that their service goes to places that the private companies won't go right now, but it still leaves the door open for the private companies to go there later once the population grows enough to make it worthwhile.
Re:So, err, WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
My company gets our internet to our servers via a small town utility... it is excellent service. I have a 15Mb/s fiber directly into the server room. At the same time, Verizon gives a few bundled T1's and tells us we should be grateful. We want more speed from them, and they tell us we would have to pay thousands and thousands to trench some fiber out to us. (we told them we would consider it, if we got to share revenue from ANYONE else that connected to that fiber that we would have paid for in our large business park, and they stopped talking to us).
Meanwhile, both verizon and charter are fighting hard to stop the utility from expanding service. They went into a neighbourhood, and started offering a few megabits for something like $25/month, which was enough for the utility to make a profit (they don't have to pay for lobbying, or for TV stations, etc). 75% of the residents in that neighbourhood switched within 2 months! Many paid the cancellation fees to get out of contracts, because the service was cheap, worked well, and actually gave the advertised speed.
Restrictions seem reasonable (Score:4, Interesting)
Financially separate operations - I'd honestly be angry if they weren't separate.
No below-cost service - Again, reasonable. Because doing so would either mean other tax money is being used, or that the government is borrowing to support it. Neither is good.
No borrowing without a referendum - A bit restrictive, but not too much so. Besides, since when has democracy been a bad thing?
I can easily imagine private companies being able to compete with this without absolutely dominating. Community broadband will likely be relatively slow - there's no incentive to go beyond what most people will use. A small business could probably work by providing higher-speed access at higher cost - those who want more speed will pay for it, but those who just need "good-enough" internet will be fine on community broadband.
Now, the one thing I am worried about is potential censorship. Certain highly-conservative communities might try to ban, say, pornography. Hyper-liberal communities might try to limit other things (a gaming curfew, similar to the recent Korean law, might be one of them). As far as I'm concerned, both are completely unacceptable. And also very likely to be tried - American politics tends to be very polarizing, even in homogeneous-party communities. I imagine most courts will throw the laws out, but you never know.
Re:Restrictions seem reasonable (Score:4, Interesting)
Financially separate operations - I'd honestly be angry if they weren't separate.
So should the internet division have its own revenue collection department and its own call center rather than adding a line item to the existing tax bill? That's adding inefficiency... why?
No below-cost service - Again, reasonable. Because doing so would either mean other tax money is being used, or that the government is borrowing to support it. Neither is good.
But that doesn't make sense. Aren't telecoms today required to provide below-cost service in e.g. rural areas? Isn't there some government funding (tax money) to help make that happen?
No borrowing without a referendum - A bit restrictive, but not too much so. Besides, since when has democracy been a bad thing?
The democratic part is where the community says "Hey let's have community internet."
The undemocratic part is where outside companies that don't even have a vote in the community say "Nope you have to go through this checklist of crap first."
We're talking about local municipal broadband, not state or federal. This isn't a central government building a service for people who are only loosely connected to them. It's small towns where everybody knows the mayor and the city council. They go to barbecues together.
Now, the one thing I am worried about is potential censorship. Certain highly-conservative communities might try to ban, say, pornography. Hyper-liberal communities might try to limit other things (a gaming curfew, similar to the recent Korean law, might be one of them). As far as I'm concerned, both are completely unacceptable.
I agree, but they do a pretty good job with stuff like electricity and water. I've never heard of an electric utility say "Sorry we won't provide power to a strip club" or "If you play bad games on your computer we'll cut your power because we don't like that."
Re:Open Source Broadband (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state I don't thinkt it's possible to create a passenger system that could pay for itself. Even when railroad networks became the primary means of long distance mass transit, freight actually paid the bills.
What's more, I'll wager that road systems don't pay for themselves and require considerable taxpayer support.
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Interesting)
First off this law is about dismantling broadband services provided by the municipalities above cost and were turning a profit but still cheaper than the large telecoms. Under no circumstances were these loss-leaders, so don't go believing the BS the republicans were peddling in this case, they intentionally dismantled the public service to prevent private services from having to compete. This is why by definition public services are definitively better at pricing than private, they need to merely break even to prove worth while while private services need to turn a profit. The less people in North Carolina have access to the internet the better in the eyes of conservatives.
That being said, on the subject of mass transit systems, in a world where the middle class drive cars most of the time the poor and urban require mass transit. In turn they can't afford to subsidize the bus themselves. So as part of the grand scheme of capitalism the richer people need to give the poorer people atleast a modicum of access in order for their life blood to grease the wheels of society. In other words: sometimes you just need to pay for shit so the underclass can keep serving your undeserving ass.
In most cases the only mass transit system available is a bus which is a costly item to run and tends to take up road surface in highly congested areas. Light rail is more efficient but costs more upfront. So either way somebody who never uses it is going to have to pay for it to help everybody else out. But as I stated above, something you just have to do certain things.