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Comment by samfriedman | Hacker News Reader

Longmont, CO also has municipal (gigabit) broadband. At the first attempt, telecoms spent $200,000 to stifle the measure. In 2011 it was tried again, and despite $400,000 in spending by telecoms the measure passed. [0]

Now in Fort Collins, the cable lobby outspent the city $900,000 to $15,000 on campaigning and still lost. [TFA]

I wonder if anti-municipal campaign spending by the telecoms will continue to increase, and just how far they will go before cutting their losses and trying to defeat these plans some other way.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/19/longmo...

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I'm reading this as a side-effect of just how absolutely hated broadband companies like Comcast and Verizon are. They've spent decades ignoring consumers, doing exactly what they don't want, providing shoddy service, providing shoddy support, doing absolutely fuck all other than continuously raking in money.

Now they want us to help them by stomping out government competition? Fat chance. They'll just have to do what they did with net neutrality: spend years and years planting people in agencies and political positions to push their self-interests. I hope they do and I hope it backfires.

I doubt they can blow a million on lobbying in every city that starts talking about municipal broadband, so I'm guessing if this trend continues they're going to switch focus to attempting to outlaw it entirely. Certainly possible, but it seems like a harder target than dismantling net neutrality.

I feel like Comcast/Verizon/CenturyLink were too short-sighted. If they were only 50% as shitty to their customers as they have been, they could have ridden that gravy train for a long time. But instead they treat it as a contest to see who can twist the knife more, and there's such a backlash that they're going to start completely losing big markets.

Hey, I can't get my 25% executive bonus if I don't somehow squeeze another 2% out of my department's expenses.

This yacht won't pay for itself, you know.

Exactly. That's what I'm getting at. Being public companies means they have to report results quarterly, which gives incentives to juice the numbers with short term gains so long as the costs, like public goodwill and brand reputation, can't be quantified and can't be put on the balance sheet.

Unless you have jeff bezos skills to convince ling term this is better.

Comcast in particular seems to evoke near-universal feelings of rage, and has done so for decads. I remember a while back, my dad looked into bonded ISDN as an option when we couldn't get DSL just to avoid Comcast (ISDN turned out to be way too expensive, but the moment FIOS was available he switched, after using Comcast for over a decade)

See also Comcast's customer satisfaction scores rise, but are still below the IRS's: http://bgr.com/2017/04/25/comcast-customer-service-scores-20...

Americans in general don't trust the government to provide good services and yet municipal broadband gets strong support from voters almost everywhere. It's really hard to understate how much people don't like Comcast

... and it is wonderful in Longmont, CO: $50/month for a gigabit Internet.

In Douglas, CO I get five hundreths of yours for 60 dollars.

One mile outside of Longmont's service area I get 1/10th of the speed for $80.

How is it in terms of availability, responsiveness to issues, and those kinds of things?

Imagine if they spent that money on infrastructure upgrades instead of on ads

It's not clear to me from that USA Today article... what the cable lobbies spending that money on? Advertising aimed at residents? What do those ads look like? Or is it just "lobbying" (bribing) the local officials?

Advertising is definitely a big part of it. A common angle is to release commercials basically saying, "we shouldn't be spending government money on fiber when we could use that money for [insert emotionally-charged need that could be improved in literally every town in existence]"

Eventually those companies will have to start lobbying for those alternative public investments - the emotional argument is far more effective when <emotionally-charged need> is on the same ballot.

In Fort Collins, 2b was a ballot measure. Most of the money went to advertising. I had a hard time finding direct examples online, but this article (http://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2017/11/01/fact-check-f...) does have a picture of the many mailers received by some voters. (I lived in Longmont when the second vote happened and can confirm many similar mailings as the article)

I live in Fort Collins and can confirm that we were absolutely inundated with mailers, and other forms of ads.

The ads look like this, hilariously stupid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjulAWmLmx0

[0] https://www.ftcollinspriorities.com

Money being spent on advertising is a bit of a dubious figure coming from an advertising company. If Comcast is putting local ads on their cable channels saying "vote no", then quoting the retail price of those ad spots is going to inflate the figure. Sure they may be giving up some potential revenue, but the actual cost to the company is not what is quoted.

I wonder if they get to claim a tax deduction for “donating” air time in this manner ...?

They would be donating it to themselves, so I hope not. One could maybe imagine a situation where they setup a super pac and have that organization spend the money on political advertising, but that seems so easy of a dodge that the IRS must have a way to detect it.

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