North Carolina residents get pro-industry "push poll" calls.

When it comes to representing the rights and profits of big business, there is no better friend to turn to than “Americans for Prosperity,” a front group designed to protect the prosperity of big corporate interests and their fat cat friends who write checks to keep these groups in business.

The group’s “North Carolina chapter” has recently been exposed as being behind a scam push poll operation and harassing recorded message campaign calling residents in or near communities with planned municipal broadband systems.  The messages, and the group, attempt to put a conservative political spin on municipal broadband, hoodwinking state residents into thinking there is some sort of government takeover of broadband in the state, financed with tax dollars.

Of course, the municipal broadband systems under consideration in the state are being financed by bond issues that do not co-mingle taxpayer funds, and the systems are designed to be self-sustaining through subscription revenues.  Many were built from expanding municipal fiber networks originally intended to serve local government.  They are being proposed in areas where incumbent cable and telephone companies have deemed those communities “sufficiently served” by broadband, at inadequate speeds and high prices (and soon to be much higher if tiered pricing returns).

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This week, StoptheCap! will be paying extra attention to the events in North Carolina, as the state legislature continues its review of two bills that would effectively end municipal broadband competition across the state.  Competition is a key asset in dealing with rogue corporate providers that leverage the lack of competitiveness in a market with high prices and comparatively bad service.  Time Warner, among other incumbent providers, have been heavily engaged in trying to stop municipal competition before it spreads around the state.

If you are a resident of North Carolina, this is your action week.  Without the potential threat of municipal broadband, big providers can keep your access capped, metered, and slow.  Threaten them with the potential of competition, and your access to the latest broadband technology is a much safer bet.

If you are outside of North Carolina, you should still be paying close attention to this issue.  If your community is stuck with a single provider of fast broadband threatening to impose profit parties through caps and metered billing, and the other provider in town offers slow service, is unavailable, or threatens to cap as well, municipal broadband is a mighty powerful sword to wave at bad actors.  Protecting the ability to build such a system requires vigilance from bad legislation hand-written by big cable and their lobbyist friends to ban or restrict this tool.

Get involved, for your own sake, even if your local community doesn’t have a system on the drawing board… yet.

I will be spending the rest of the weekend working on the beta test for the site’s new look.  We have uncovered some annoying problems that will require my attention.  New content on here will resume on Monday.

Update Early Monday Morning: After a weekend of useful testing, we’ve uncovered several bugs and issues which require attention before we can bring the new “look” online.  Therefore, we will carry forward with our existing look into the early part of this week.  Hopefully some answers and fixes will be forthcoming sooner rather than later.  Thanks for your patience.

Readers of the San Antonio Express-News discovered a blazing headline today on the newspaper website: Time Warner to add Internet meters for San Antonio.

When Bryan Lee wants to see just how much bandwidth his Internet connection gobbles up, he logs on to a Web site that tracks his usage on a daily basis.

The 31-year-old project manager for a Dallas-based software company is one of Time Warner’s proverbial guinea pigs in the cable company’s ongoing test of metered service in Southeast Texas.

Before moving to Lumberton, a small town about 12 miles north of Beaumont, he enjoyed unfettered downloads. Nowadays, his monthly usage is capped at 40 gigs. And there’s an extra incentive in place to make sure he’s keeping downloads and video streams in check: overage fees.

“I look at the meter probably once a week,” he said. “It really changes your mind-set with this whole overages thing. You become fearful of going on the Internet.”

After bowing to backlash from customers and Congress over plans to change pricing for Internet usage, Time Warner Cable is moving forward with plans to outfit customers in San Antonio and three other markets with similar measurement tools.

The cable company is hoping the “gas gauges” will make it easier to eventually try again at implementing a billing structure that charges customers varying rates based on Internet usage.

StoptheCap! readers Jimmy and Sebastian noted the article, and the ranting and raving from outraged subscribers down in San Antonio — more than 65 in just the last few hours alone.  It’s good to see subscribers are just as mad as they were two weeks ago when the cap “experiment” was on before it was off.  And as we have been warning all along, it’s going to be “on” again real soon.

I dropped a comment over there encouraging readers not to simply limit their anger to the comments section on mysanantonio.com, but to also get their butts over here and start getting educated, informed, and prepared to do battle with Time Warner the instant the Time Warner Money Party is back on again.

If you’ve arrived here today because of that comment, welcome to the fight.  We’re ordinary subscribers of broadband service from many different companies and in many different cities.  We share one thing in common – NO CAPS! Many of the folks you will encounter in our own comment section are also victims survivors of the Time Warner experiment in April in Austin, Rochester, San Antonio, and Greensboro/Triad, NC.  We’re all working together to effectively resist money grabs by big cable.

You will find an enormous number of articles, video and audio clips, references, and news here documenting the whole sorry affair.  Please bookmark this site and stay in touch.  We will have calls to action on a regular basis to effectively keep abusive business practices at bay.

If you’re new, you can find the Comments button adjacent to the headline of the article.  Click it and say hello and tell us your story and views.

Thanks for the overwhelming response.  We have more than enough folks to help us out with this.  Thanks for everyone who volunteered.  Everyone will have a chance to comment on the new look when it goes live, hopefully by Monday.

As we progress towards our new theme, I’d like some beta testers who are using different browsers and operating systems to preview and test things out to make sure it’s compatible for everyone and looks professional. All you have to do is browse and let me know if things look out of place, don’t work right, or appear odd on your browser. No technical skill is required.  You can even let me know what looks good and what doesn’t.

If interested and available for casual browsing over the weekend, use the Contact form linked above, click volunteer, and let me know you can help. Include your Operating System (XP, Vista, OS X, etc.), Browser (IE 6/7/8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.), and let me know if you are on cable, DSL, or fiber. It should take less than 30 minutes total.