Suck It, Telecoms! Public Broadband Gets Reprieve in North Carolina

Posted by Tana Ganeva, AlterNet at 1:36 PM on May 6, 2009.

The North Carolina legislature just sent a bill to study committee (a.k.a shelved it at least until next year) that would have crippled municipal broadband projects in the state.

Here’s why that’s a really, really good (albeit temporary) thing: According to a recent study, America ranks 15th in the world in broadband access. This is partly because we have a very large population spread over a very large amount of space. But it is also because private companies don’t care about poor people and refuse to build broadband infrastructure in rural areas and many low-income city neighborhoods.

This is where municipal broadband plans come in. Local governments set up networks providing fast Internet access to underserved or totally ignored areas, for free or at significantly lower prices than would private providers.

But not if the telecoms can help it! ISPs, distressed by the prospect of actual competition in an otherwise monopolized industry, claim that municipal broadband has an unfair advantage over private broadband providers.

And one way to “level the playing between between the public and private sectors”, as a Time Warner Cable spokesperson ridiculously put it, is to lobby for deeply unpopular legislation that would effectively kill local government broadband projects.

The North Carolina bill, backed by Time Warner Cable and Embarq, an offshoot of Sprint, would have placed such onerous restrictions on municipal networks as to effectively make them unworkable.

Among other things, the bill would have:

— Prohibited the use of government revenue from other sources — e.g. gas, electricity — in constructing or running the networks.

— Require the government to charge customers extra, in order to make up for the fees it would cost a private company to get start-up funds (the government can borrow more cheaply)

-- A measure in the bill would prevent local communities from taking advantage of Federal Broadband Stimulus Grants — this measure is in direct conflict with President Obama’s broadband policy, which seeks to spur broadband development in underserved areas in part by encouraging municipal build-out.

As DSL reports puts it, while the bill would have been great for the  telecoms, it doesn’t do much for “State residents, local businesses, local health care infrastructure, local government operations, or the large corporations that benefit from greater broadband penetration.”

Let’s hope North Carolina legislators — and government officials throughout the country — put the public good before telecom industry profits.

Tagged as: internet, broadband, telecoms, north carolina, time warner, municipal broadband