Thursday’s Winston-Salem Journal featured an editorial calling on the North Carolina legislature to get out of the way as municipalities across the state take control of their broadband destinies.

The piece, Broadband Battle, echoes what Stop the Cap! has been writing for more than a year now:

• More than decade after the Internet became a household word, too many households in the state still don’t have broadband access to it;
• “High-speed,” as defined by many of the state’s providers, doesn’t meet today’s definition of multimedia-ready broadband that can support today’s high bandwidth applications;
• When private providers cannot or will not meet a community’s needs, they shouldn’t have to wait indefinitely for that to change.  If municipalities want to establish high-speed service at the behest of their residents, let them!

The Journal sees through a transparent effort by Senator David Hoyle and others to ensure protectionism for a marketplace duopoly.

Fifteen years after Internet use became common, the telecoms still do not provide high-speed service to much of North Carolina. They can’t expect people to wait any longer.

The telecommunications industry wants the legislature to make it more difficult for local governments to offer high-speed Internet service. The giant companies say they can’t compete with local governments in towns of a couple thousand people.

If the telecoms don’t want local governments to establish these Internet services, they should rush into these areas and establish service now.

The newspaper points out the yoga-like stretching Hoyle and his allies are doing to justify their obstacle course for municipal broadband, noting they are demanding a higher standard for financing municipal broadband than exists for most other government borrowing. And legislators would look hypocritical in passing such legislation because they’ve been borrowing without bond referenda for many years.

The newspaper takes a common sense attitude about such projects — if providers really want to stop them, they should rush into the areas where they are proposed and deliver the world-class 21st century broadband service consumers want and prices they can afford.  Instead, they divert subscriber’s monthly bill payments to high-priced lobbying efforts to kill potential competition.

The editorial’s advice to the General Assembly?  Ignore the telecoms on this issue.  Unfortunately, for some legislators, that means ignoring campaign contributions.  The best way to strengthen their resolve is to let them know they won’t get any more of those checks if they aren’t re-elected.