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Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
According to a report by the National Institute on Money in State Politics, Dialing Up the Dollars: Telecommunication Interests Donated Heavily to NC Lawmakers, Republican lawmakers and those who held key leadership positions, sponsored the bill, and/or who voted in favor of the bill received considerably more campaign contributions from the telecommunication donors than did their colleagues. For example, lawmakers who voted in favor of HB 129 received on average 76 percent more than the average received by those who voted against the bill. The four primary sponsors of the bill received an average of $9,438 each, more than double the $3,658 given on average to lawmakers who did not sponsor the bill.Recall that Time Warner Cable pushed this bill for years with some help from AT&T, CenturyLink, and others that stood to benefit by limiting broadband competition. But the Legislature wisely refused to enact it... until 2011. Now we have a better sense of what may have shifted the balance. Consider this:
Thom Tillis, who became speaker of the house in 2011, received $37,000 in 2010–2011 (despite running unopposed in 2010), which is more than any other lawmaker and significantly more than the $4,250 he received 2006–2008 combined. AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon each gave Tillis $1,000 in early-mid January, just before he was sworn in as speaker on January 26. Tillis voted for the bill, and was in a key position to ensure it moved along the legislative pipeline.Running unopposed for office, he collected more money from the cable and phone companies than any other Representative and almost 10 times as much as in the previous two cycle combined. As Speaker, he set the agenda and decided priorities.
According to the complaint (pdf), Verizon not only made out like a financial bandit up front, but took advantage of regulatory delays to strip mine the assets of anything of value, including core IP network components, business services, and localized billing and support assets required to support the three states. Verizon then billed out their support assistance for millions per month during the very rocky transition, during which time 911 and other services saw repeated outages, resulting in millions more in refund penalties.Karl Bode is right to criticize the state authorities that allowed this fiasco to occur. Their inability to regulate in the public interest has hurt everyone stuck in the mess. While we can expect powerful companies like Verizon to try to game the system at every opportunity, there is no excuse for making it so easy for them. As long as we are talking about Verizon shedding its rural investments, let's take a look at how Frontier is doing since it inherited thousands upon thousands of FiOS customers as part of its recent deal with Verizon.
Comcast has once again distinguished itself as an extraordinary company - not only do Americans trust it less than any other company on the list, it occupies the two bottom positions. Big shocker that communities want better local service with their own networks.
Accoding to the 2011 Temkin Trust Ratings, which looks at the level of trust that consumers have in 143 large U.S. companies in a total of 12 industries, only eight companies earned "very strong" ratings while 26 earned "very weak" ratings.Comcast was the worst. But it is in the company we would expect - Time Warner Cable and Charter are close to the bottom also.
Where would be without humor? I just hope Time Warner Cable isn't inspired to add more bogus charges to their bills following this article. A sample:
$17.23 — Basic service $37.35 — Standard service $40.81 — Actual service $12.50 — Federal taxes $11.75 — Federal taxes, part two $6.85 — New York City taxes $5.35 — Fort Wayne, Indiana, city taxes $3.45 — Singapore Nuclear Defense Fund $16.30 — Twenty-five-per-cent gratuity $13.99 — DVR (disabled video recorder) ...
In 1999, Greenville, Texas' economic development leaders were unable to attract certain businesses and on the verge of losing existing companies due to a lack of high speed Internet. In response, Mayor Sue Ann Harting asked SBC for a commitment to deploy DSL. That request was denied. The city's cable franchise, Time Warner, also declined to commit to cable modem Internet deployment. Greenville found itself in a situation similar to one that many towns had faced years ago when railroads changed transportation. If the railroad was not routed through a town, that town just might die. What would happen to Greenville if the information superhighway did not come through the city?Incumbent cable and telephone companies, their lobbyists, and associated "think tanks" like to claim that communities are somehow "duped" into building publicly owned networks. The truth is that just about every community wants to avoid the hassle of building a network but incumbents refuse to invest sufficiently to keep the community competitive for economic development and a high quality of life. They build networks when backed into a corner, not because they want to. Fortunately, all that hassle almost always pays off with far more benefits than problems over the long term as communities transition from depending on some distant corporation to solving their own problems locally. In fact, the results are often like that of Greenville:
Greenville citizens were not willing to take that chance. They took destiny into their own hands by amending the city charter to allow their revenue-only supported, municipally-owned electric system to build a hybrid fiber coaxial system to make high speed Internet available to everyone.
“Essentially this bill is a cable monopoly protection bill,” said Doug Paris, assistant city manager of Salisbury, N.C., another city with its own broadband service. “It protects Time Warner Cable and ensures they will continue to do what they’ve been doing for decades, which is serving where they want to serve and not serving where they don’t want to serve.”And though it may be tacky to quote myself, I do quite like the quote…
Christopher Mitchell, director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit economic and community development consulting group, agreed and said that there is “almost no chance” another community in North Carolina will be able to build a new broadband network under the law. “The Legislature, in passing laws like this, shows just how out of touch they are,” Mitchell said. “It’s very clear to me that North Carolina’s legislators don’t understand the difference between a slow DSL connection and a modern, reliable fiber-optic connection. They don’t understand that what Time Warner [Cable] and CenturyLink are selling isn’t helping communities be competitive in the modern era.”I hope communities and activists around the country have taken note of the power incumbents wield and are starting to talk to elected officials to educate them and build the relationships necessary to counteract all the money in politics.