The case for publicly owned Internet service

[The Philosopher]

from The Cap Times
by Susan P. Crawford

In cities and towns across the United States, a familiar story is replaying itself: Powerful companies are preventing local governments from providing an essential service to their citizens. More than 100 years ago, it was electricity. Today, it is the public provision of communications services.

The Georgia legislature is currently considering a bill that would effectively make it impossible for any city in the state to provide for high-speed Internet access networks — even in areas in which the private sector cannot or will not. Nebraska, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee already have similar laws in place. South Carolina is considering one, as is Florida.

Mayors across the U.S. are desperate to attract good jobs and provide residents with educational opportunities, access to affordable health care, and other benefits that depend on affordable, fast connectivity — something that people in other industrialized countries take for granted. But powerful incumbent providers such as AT&T and Time Warner Cable are hamstringing municipalities.

At the beginning of the 20th century, private power companies electrified only the most lucrative population centers and ignored most of America, particularly rural America. By the mid-1920s, 15 holding companies controlled 85 percent of the nation's electricity distribution, and the Federal Trade Commission found that the power trusts routinely gouged consumers.

In response, and recognizing that cheap, plentiful electricity was essential to economic development and quality of life, thousands of communities formed electric utilities of their own. Predictably, the private utilities claimed that public ownership of electrical utilities was "costly and dangerous" and "always a failure," according to the November 1906 issue of Moody's Magazine. Now more than 2,000 communities in the U.S., including Seattle, San Antonio and Los Angeles, provide their own electricity.

...

Running for president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized the right of communities to provide their own electricity. "I might call the right of the people to own and operate their own utility a birch rod in the cupboard," he said, "to be taken out and used only when the child gets beyond the point where more scolding does any good." It's time to take out that birch rod.

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I read this article in the Dallas Morning News and it floored me. It never occurred to me that this could be done. What's needed to actually get an internet co-op started and what is the cost?

[The Doctor.]

1. It's a good plan.

It would likely be an issue that would go to the SCOTUS. Hopefully we aren't a fascist state by then.

[xmas74]

2. I think a nearby community has one

in conjunction with it's phone company.

(Just looked it up-it's all employee owned and locally owned. http://www.ctcis.net/whoWeAre/index.htm)

[freethought]

3. Some state have already erected legal roadblocks to community internet!

I live in North Carolina, in the Raleigh/Durham region is the small town of Wilson. A few years ago the town looked into installing their own internet broadband service. To their surprise they realized that to do such a thing was well in their grasp. The technology was readily available and inexpensive. Not only that but subscriber to the service, called "Greenlight", would get better performance (100 mbps-towns elsewhere are reporting even higher speeds!) than Time-Warner Cable could provide at probably less than a third of the cost! And thus Wilson began the process of setting up the infa-structure. This seemed like a good path for a number of NC municipalities given that much of N.C. is largely rural with pockets of urban and suburban areas like Raleigh/Durham, Charlotte, and Wilmington. A few other towns followed suit, such as Salisbury, NC

Seemed to make absolute sense to most people, broadband service, with superior performance, at lower cost. As I see it, that's the way capitalism is supposed to work, competition keeps prices down and if one firm wins over another, so be it.

That's not the way Time-Warner saw it however. The lobbyists turned out in force and soon H129 was introduced into the NC legislature, sponsored by NC state rep Marilyn Avila who described municipalities wanting to set up their own networks as "predatory". It was essentially competitive protection to established internet service providers, of which there is only one-Time/Warner cable. Gov. Bev Purdue(D) actually gave these ever-so-helpless big ISPs a victory by doing nothing, she neither signed nor vetoed the bill which made it law by default. She gave this justification for not signing/vetoing H129:

"There is a need to establish rules to prevent cities and towns from having an unfair advantage over providers in the private sector. My concern with House Bill 129 is that the restrictions the General Assembly has imposed on cities and towns who want to offer broadband services may have the effect of decreasing the number of choices available to their citizens."

"For these reasons, I will neither sign nor veto this bill. Instead, I call on the General Assembly to revisit this issue and adopt rules that not only promote fairness but also allow for the greatest number of high quality and affordable broadband options for consumers."

Those towns that already had these networks in place received exemptions, those that already had it could keep it but future expansion would be zero. In addition it made it virtually impossible for other towns to gain funds to do the same or would make them too expensive for small municipalities to establish.

This all went down in May of last year. As far as I know about 16 states have followed suit with out and out prohibition and others have put regulations/restrictions on community based internet service.

Gee, nice to see big telecom providers have their supporters. Looks like consumers can drop dead.

[smaug]

4. Same law in many states, including Arkansas

My teatard state representative (Nate Bell) supported it (reTHUGlican lockstep) and is surprised that we can't set up municipal broadband here because of the outlawing of public investment in infrastructure. Funny how giant corporations can't deal with competition from small towns in rural areas, which are told that they don't provide enough profit for the private-for-profit big company to provide service. But legislation provided by the telco (or ALEC - same difference in my book) can ban even "profitless" areas from providing for themselves.