The growth of municipal broadband networks

Sun Mar 27 21:31:11 UTC 2011

On 27/03/2011, at 6:35 PM, "Michael Painter" <tvhawaii at shaka.com> wrote:

> Owen DeLong wrote:
>> On Mar 26, 2011, at 11:36 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Owen DeLong" <owen at delong.com>
>>>> As such, I'm sure that such a move would be vocally opposed by
>>>> the current owners of the LMI who enjoy leveraging it to extort
>>>> monopolistic pricing from substandard services.
>>> As I noted, yes, that's Verizontal, and they have apparently succeeded
>>> in lobbying to have it made *illegal* in several states.  I don't have
>>> citations to hand, but there are a couple sites that track muni fiber;
>>> I can find some.
>>> Cheers,
>>> -- jra
>> Laws can be changed if we can get enough momentum behind
>> doing the right thing.
>> Owen
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
> 

While I agree that laws can and should be changed and I agree that the
USA's telco privatization scheme no longer fits the pace of technology, 
those who believe have a long way toward momentum.  Those of us who 
believe in a muni or a national broadband infrastructure are opposed by a 
mountain of money (to be made) and an army of lawyers.  For instance, 
when this army couldn't hope to have muni networking outlawed on a 
national basis they turned to each state legislature.  They're ticking off the 
states one by one:

http://www.cybertelecom.org/broadband/muni.htm

jy