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It looks like StoptheCap! gets to wrap up North Carolina Week today after four days of intense lobbying and fighting back against telecom lobbies and the clueless legislators duped into doing their bidding (or financially rewarded with a nice campaign contribution.)
We’ve learned several lessons from this battle, which we managed to win on both fronts, thanks to the help of everyone who got involved:
I was unable to attend this morning’s meeting of the Senate Commerce Committee, but just received a text message from Senator Don Vaughn, who represents me, indicating they sent SB 1004 to the “study committee.”
It has been a wild ride the last two days. There was an estimated 150 people in the House Committee meeting yesterday. Everyone from ordinary consumers like us, mayors of cities interested in our fight, to the pro-business/cable “Americans for Prosperity” who showed up wearing anti-communism buttons.
The companion bill in the North Carolina Senate that would have effectively killed municipal networks across the state has gone the way of the House bill HB 1252 — into the black hole of the “study committee.” While the issue may yet re-emerge after it “has been studied,” it’s dead for now. Thank you to everyone in North Carolina who responded with an outpouring of calls and e-mails to elected officials in the Senate after big cable tried a sneak attack to ram this through this morning.
This is your third victory for consumer rights in less than a month. We’re on a roll!
Sneaking in the backdoor - the Senate companion bill scheduled for tomorrow morning!
[12:40am ET Thursday Morning – Added More Contact Information, Expanded Article] I have just been informed big cable and their lobbying friends are going to try to pull a fast one on us in North Carolina. Sometimes you successfully defeat them at the front door while they sneak in the back. That is precisely what they are going to try tomorrow morning.
Brian Bowman, Public Affairs Manager for the city of Wilson, just informed us that Senate Bill 1004, the companion hit-piece on consumers to HB 1252, has been moved up for consideration in a Senate committee tomorrow morning bright and early.
In a sneak attack, the industry hopes to breeze through the approval process on the Senate side after failing in the North Carolina House of Representatives. So unless you get on the phone right now and make those calls, today’s victory could become tomorrow’s defeat. Allowing big cable and telco lobbies to get their foot jammed in the back door is a consumer catastrophe.
It’s clear the industry people have already camped out in several offices and have brought the pizza and coffee. When Bowman called one of the chairperson’s offices to confirm the time, the administrative assistant literally handed the phone to a cable company employee to explain the bill! How nice of them.
This really reminds me of 1990. Back then, a few bad actors in the cable industry were acting so naughty, they created a groundswell of support for legislative action against the cable industry as a whole. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was sky high rate increases, poor service, and trying to deny competitors access to cable programming networks. The level of arrogance among the cable companies reached a high point when, then Senator Al Gore (D-TN), called the industry as a “cable cosa nostra.” We were in the thick of it back then, working to get passage of S.12, a bill to re regulate cable which passed in 1992.
In 2009, some of the same winds are blowing. The industry is attempting to “test” pricing for broadband that either rations Internet usage, or extorts an enormous amount of money for it. Industry leaders promise upgrades in return for rate hikes to customers, and then tell their own investors those upgrades are not immediately necessary. They use inconsistent arguments, bought-and-paid-for research, and clueless legislators who are duped (or bought) to carry their legislative agenda.
It always takes just a few issues, usually coming in sequence, to turn a minor skirmish into a major war, and I think we’re one or two issues away from a full court press to force dramatic changes in the cable and telephone industry. So far, the issues which are coalescing include:
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