Your ship's captain for a catastrophic anti-consumer cruise sponsored by Time Warner

Representative Harrell, we honestly cannot understand your surprise over the outrage and backlash that came after you handcrafted, on spec from Time Warner and its lobbying lawyers, an incredibly anti-consumer, anti-competitive, nightmare of a piece of legislation designed to destroy municipal broadband across the state of North Carolina.

Rep. Ty Harrell (D-NC), who normally considers himself a progressive Democrat, has so bumbled his way through this entire affair, he’s managed to end up on the same side as the ultra-big-corporate friendly Americans for Prosperity, which is now war-dialing its way through North Carolina with push polls and fear-monger phone messages.  If that doesn’t sound alarm bells that something isn’t right, what will?  He admits he didn’t realize North Carolina has been through this anti-consumer nonsense before.  In 2007, largely the same bill was bought and paid for by big telecom special interests, but failed to pass after elected officials realized it would antagonize their constituents into voting for anyone but them in the next election.  No kidding.

Harrell said he introduced the legislation, which amazingly channels industry wishes word for word, because ‘Time Warner approached him and asked for it,’ and even worse:

Opponents suggested a study bill, but Harrell says the industry representatives refused to consider it. “Having gone through those battles last time, the proponents of this bill were basically saying, ‘We’ve gone down that road before and we want to have it heard in committee. I said, ‘OK, since my name is on it and you’re in my district.’”

Time Warner evidently has direct access to the Ty Harrell’s Legislation Hotline, because when consumers call asking for protection from sky high rate hikes and municipal broadband competition, the only question from his office apparently is, “how did you get this number?”

Our conservative readers here get it. They know the best way to fight monopolies is to promote competition, which this bill certainly does not. Our progressive readers here get it. They know that an unregulated duopoly of providers (or monopoly in many areas) will deliver the slow service at high prices, so when private companies aren’t interested in delivering, their own community should step up and provide better service.  Your bill trashes the dreams and hopes of both by making competition impractical and monopolies/duopolies a sure thing across the state.

It’s a real shame the only ones that don’t get it are elected officials who do the bidding of big cable and don’t have the wisdom to realize the way to survive this consumer catastrophe is not to be a part of it in the first place.  Perhaps voters will need to remind them.

Contact Information:

Phone:      919-733-5602
Email:     [email protected]

Rep. Ty Harrell
NC House of Representatives
16 W. Jones Street, Room 2121
Raleigh, NC 27601-1096

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.

The Time Warner protest in Greensboro attracted a lot of car honking approval, and even with a relatively small group of protestors, got significant coverage on local media.

“The fight for a flat rate.”  WXII reports regularly emphasize Time Warner has delayed, not withdrawn their tiered pricing experiment.  April 18, 2009