Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about. Members of Broadband for America Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to […]
October 2, 2009
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to […]
September 27, 2009
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of Hong […]
September 23, 2009
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be […]
September 23, 2009
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way. Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw […]
September 22, 2009
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail. [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s] proposal – to codify and enforce some […]
September 21, 2009
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario […]
September 11, 2009
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them. This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment […]
September 7, 2009
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes. Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by […]
September 1, 2009
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta. After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Good Alberta […]
August 31, 2009
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling […]
August 27, 2009
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider. PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community. The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking […]
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I would never vote for Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, or any Republican or political candidate that will undermine the FCC’s ability to punish states that bans cities or other communities offering municipal broadband. We need competition to have more choice of ISPs with no data caps. We need Bernie Sanders to win at this point to save the internet.
It’s not that Sen. Cruz is against the expansion of Broadband in growing communities. The issue is that it should be the States decision and not something the Federal Government needs to be involved in. If there is any push back on these types of regulations it is only because Sen. Cruz, and those like him, are trying to limit the size and scope of the Federal Government and they feel that the states should govern themselves and not be told what to do by the Almighty Federal Government.
The FCC is not a federal court. They should not be able to overturn state or local law. This has nothing to do with municipal broadband. It has to do with FCC overreach. I don’t like the idea of state or local governments banning municipal broadband, but the idea of the FCC overturning state or local laws is far worse.
By that logic, the FCC shouldn’t exist, because state and local laws conflict with federal laws by their very nature. As a federal institution they need the oversight to overcome that morass.
If they didn’t have that power, the states would be a patchwork of nonsensical laws like “Nebraskan internet cannot be used between 2pm and 5pm by visiting Wyoming residents.” Unification of standards is the purpose of the FCC, and in a democracy the majority is supposed to decide the standard, not individual states. But we don’t live in a democracy any more, do we?
We never have lived in a Democracy. We live in a Republic. The federal government is supposed to protect individual rights defined in the Bill of Rights. States are self-governing and should have limited interference from the federal government.
Democratic Republic, ostensibly. The entire purpose of the FCC is to define the standards by which entities may and may not conduct electronic communications. That includes states, of course. Rather than restricting rights the FCC enables their participation in a global communications market. Lacking that, the states would have no rights because they would have no economy.
You can argue that states should have limited interference from government, sure. But I think the entire internet should have limited interference from state senators with a oligarchic agenda. Because, you know, an oligarchy isn’t a democracy or a republic.
I would never support anyone who directly or indirectly would want to limit consumer choices for internet. If a municipality can provide faster and cheaper internet to more people, there should not be a state or federal law prohibiting them from doing so. As a consumer with limited choices, I’m all for Tom Wheeler’s FCC to right the wrongs of those states that do so.
It has nothing to do with consumer choice on broadband. It has to do with unelected bureaucrats in the FCC, who are not accountable to congress (the people), overturning state or local laws. That is a job of the co-equal Judicial branch of the government. If the FCC is capable of overturning state and local laws, what prevents the other bureaucracies from doing the same thing?
Wow. On a bad day I wonder if this is a key part of the endgame of the Republican party. They see a minority-majority US coming so they try to stop the spread of broadband into rural areas so that young people leave for the blue states and the old people stay behind watching Fox News on Satellite TV. Nobody moves in because they can’t get broadband, there are no new jobs, so the Republicans are able to milk a few years out of the geographic advantages that help them control Congressional districts and Senate seats. Citizens United could have… Read more »
Well, it’s a really dumb endgame, since the country will just end up like pre-1980s Africa. I’m not sure whether the Republicans have a plan beyond “corruption en masse.”
So much for states rights, huh?