Cable-backed anti-muni broadband bill advances in North Carolina | Hacker News Reader

Cable-backed anti-muni broadband bill advances in North Carolina

arstechnica.com

68 pointspieter30 comments

This bill is ridiculous. They ignored the small towns, the small towns got their own connections and very good ones at that, and now they want to be the only players. As an NC resident I think this is a bill most people left and right could agree is bad, but unfortunately the only party who cares enough about it and has clout is Time Warner Cable, so it'll get through.

The TriLUG (Triangle area Linux Users Group) mailing list had a very long discussion about this bill, that very quickly turned into a shit storm (it lasted for over 100 lengthy e-mails). One thing I learned from it is that not everybody views this bill as negative, even in the tech sector. Basically, TWC just strong-armed a few congressmen/congresswomen into voting their way by contributing to their campaigns, and the opposition could not get organized in time.

I'm in Raleigh, hate this bill, and want to bring attention to it. I bet there's a lot of us. We should get organized.

email is george@ill-k.com, anyone who likes can drop me a line.

See this blog:

http://savencbb.wordpress.com/

Awesome, thanks! Will check in with them.

Why shouldn't a city be able to build out a network, if the citizens vote to do so?

Logic rarely enters into these types of decisions. The short answer is, citizens don't have good enough lobbyists.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/american-people-hire-highpo...

Because these same cities have rigged the fiber business through cable franchise rules that essentially award local monopolies. That's why there's not enough competition currently.

Can you point to a US city that does have a competitive broadband market? Surely they can't all have rigged the market as you suggest.

Almost without exception, local governments are corrupt on this matter. Federal and state law create the conditions for franchise quasi-monopolies, and as a result it is pay-to-play at the local level. The system used to be explicit monopolies (according to federal law) but there's a little more room for competition today, but the legacy monopoly system is in place. There are all sorts of kickbacks, taxes, free government channels, etc. you have to pay to get a cable franchise-- Verizon has spent billions on lawyers and "consultants" just to get local franchises for fios, let alone the cost of actually getting permits to lay fiber, which is a whole other local bureaucratic nightmare.

There has been some movement at the state level to create state-wide cable franchises, allowing business to ignore locals. There's also the idea of a national franchise. Really it is insane to me that we require this business to be licensed at all. Newspapers don't need licenses, why should internet providers? You should have to get permits to lay cable, but not to be a provider.

Interestingly, while Congress allows the cable operators to run wild over local communities, there is a strong federal preemption for satellite tv-- the locals have no say in it, and federal law even creates a federal right to have a dish on any residence (a lot of local governments tried to zone dishes out of existence to protect their cable buddies).

Almost without exception? That's a bold claim.

How many local governments have you served in or had any interaction with while they were negotiating their cable operating agreement? Just curious.

I served in one. Negotiated two of these contracts, a re-up with Comcast and a new one with Verizon for FiOS. We weren't corrupt. And I publicly supported the idea of a state wide cable franchise, right up until the moment that the telco lobbyists started crapping it up with a bunch of unacceptable terms (the bill eventually died).

Local officials generally don't get into it for the money, and there's no easy way for a national telco to give a local official a backhander without it being straight-up bribery. It's not a "favors" thing like with towing contracts or something like that.

   * having tax-subsidized government entities competing with private business doesn't exactly lead to a vibrant competitive marketplace

   * I'd rather not have any facet of government in an easy position to monitor my internet traffic.

By that argument, why is the government in the security business competing with the private sector to protect citizens against crime?

Up here in Socialist Canada, in addition to keeping its citizens healthy, the government actually provides the water I drink in direct competition with the private sector who sell water in nice little plastic bottles. Yum :-)

Also, the expression "tax-subsidized" is not correct. Funding an activity with taxes is one thing. Subsidizing an activity with taxes is something else, such as a program to give privately held corporations massive tax breaks in exchange for locating their businesses in a particular state or county. Which companies do, and somehow I never hear conservative pundits complain about the anti-competitive tax subsidizing going on.

By that argument, why is the government in the security business competing with the private sector to protect citizens against crime?

Well, that's the argument for anarchy, isn't it? (I am not being sarcastic).

But, as you know, "why is the government doing X" is a question which doesn't have much or anything to do with "ought we have the government do X".

Yeah, the point of the security/anarchy argument is that you can't just argue blindly from a position of "less government" as if it were an end rather than a means, because if that's your only concern, you're free to move to Somalia and experience the free market first hand.

It turns out that many subjects require more knowledge and sophistication than a 2-word bumper sticker if you want to set smart policy.

Strangely, it turns out that there are groups in Somalia who will demand that you pay them in order to continue to exist, and the penalties for not paying this -- what shall we call it? Oh, yeah -- tax is even worse than not paying taxes here. The US has far less government/crime* for its GDP than Somalia.

* "government" being what large criminal enterprises are called, basically.

Do you think that the current system has led to a vibrant competitive marketplace for consumer broadband in the US? The facts seem to be that many municipalities are able to provide much faster connections at a lower price than the local cable monopolies are either able or willing to do. If you put aside theoretical preconceptions about how economies ought to run, it's hard to see how anyone can argue the better service at a lower price is a bad thing.

Of course the price is lower. If Time Warner had the power to levy property taxes in addition to charging for internet services, they could probably get away with charging less for internet access.

If companies weren't effectively buying monopoly rights from local authorities their prices might be lower too. Here in San Francisco you still can't get residential fiber in over half the city, and you can't have it without bundled TV or phone service so the minimum is $80/mo for a 15/5 connection in the neighborhoods where it is available. There's one cable provider and one DSL provider, and the services are proportionately expensive.

For a major city in a financial/tech hub of the world's richest country, the available consumer options are pretty weak.

Are tax revenues being used to subsidize the lower price? I honestly don't know. You seem to suggest that they are, but you don't offer any data to back it up.

I'd rather not have any facet of government in an easy position to monitor my internet traffic.

In fairness, it's a bit late for that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsa#AT.26T_Internet_monitoring

Telcos and cable companies often receive subsidies at the state level to bring broadband to out-of-the-way places, for speed improvements, etc. Not sure if this is the case in NC, but the situation nationwide is not that clear-cut.

This bill angers me. I've ranted about my / my parent's situation before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328423).

TLDR version of which is: Parents are in rural NC. Northland Cable services the area but not my parent's street. Time Warner is less than mile away. They cant service area because Northland has exclusivity. DSL isnt there. 1mb wireless is there but with 30% packet loss.

It saddens me every time I return for a visit. I see more and more businesses going away (it has been like this for years) and no new businesses moving in for the most part.

I can't help but feel that if the county actually had some reliable form of internet access to a larger portion of the county (s/internet/broadband) that things could improve a little. As it stands right now, I know some folks who moved to the county for work and then left because they could not get broadband at their home.

Anyway... I'm sleepy and ranting again.

Why can't cities build and maintain the lines and lease them out to ISPs? Then TW, Cox, Comcast can compete on add-ons and how much markup they have.

Why can't private companies build duplicate lines and compete? It seems to me that what's keeping broadband prices high is government-enforced monopolies, usually awarded to a private company. Allowing government itself to have a monopoly won't fix the problem.

So ISP-One digs up your town and lays lines. A year later, Deux Tubes observes fabulous profits being earned by ISP-One and comes along to dig up your town again.

See the problem?

Not if Deux Tubes pays for the digging

I submit that your neighbors wouldn't allow several companies to repeatedly dig up roads, driveways and lawns. Also, at some point you just can't add another set of lines in the ground.

It looks like an ALEC-based bill. The article mentions weird-accounting rules for indirect subsidies, see section 13.5 of this, ALEC's model "Municipal Telecommunications Private Industry Safeguards Act":

www.muniwireless.com/reports/docs/antimunicipalbroadband.doc

(I don't know if this is the most recent model bill from ALEC)

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