The days of AT&T’s exclusive American distribution of Apple’s iPhone are dwindling, but the mobile phone provider wants to make sure you tough it out with AT&T even after the iPhone becomes available from Verizon Wireless.  If you don’t, AT&T will charge you $325 to break your two-year contract.

Effective June 1st, AT&T’s near-doubling of its early termination fee from $175 to $325 for smartphones is a shot across the bow of regulators already annoyed with cell company fees.  But aggravating the FCC and Congress may be worth it if it means locking millions of AT&T customers into new contracts expected to be signed with the release of the next generation iPhone due next month.  AT&T is making it even easier by “upgrading” many current iPhone accounts to qualify for the latest phone at the new customer price… with another two year service contract.

AT&T claims the new fee more fairly represents the cost of subsidizing increasingly popular smartphones, and the fee will decrease by $10 for every month you stay over the life of your contract.  Without the subsidy, customers would pay nearly $600 for a phone AT&T reduces in price to $199 with a two year contract.  But companies like AT&T earn back the subsidy and then some from the monthly service plan fees collected over the life of a two year contract.  Customers who bring their own unsubsidized phones to AT&T get no benefit from doing so — they pay the same artificially higher prices subsidized phone owners pay.

AT&T also announced it was slightly reducing the cancellation fee for its basic phones by $25 to $150, decreasing by $4 every month a customer remains with AT&T.  That’s not much of a concession considering many basic cell phone users are dumping contract cell phone service plans for prepaid service, where significant savings can be had.

“It is ironic indeed that news of AT&T’s early termination fee hike falls one day after the FCC’s report on the wireless industry highlighted the substantial obstacles to effective competition and the restricting effect this has had on consumer choice, service quality and price, said M. Chris Riley, Free Press policy counsel. “AT&T’s move to further price-gouge consumers is evidence of its market dominance and the need for real reform of wireless markets. The FCC needs to take action to spur competition, which will lead to lower prices and more choices for consumers who don’t wish to be bogged down in long-term contracts.”

Holding customers to two year contracts dramatically reduces subscriber churn — the practice of customers jumping from one phone carrier to another.  That means stable revenue and reduced marketing expenses aimed at signing up new customers.

Verizon Wireless already doubled their early termination fee from $175 to $350 last November.

On Friday, AT&T released an “open letter” to customers which was written as if to suggest the increased fees benefited consumers:

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.

Retiring North Carolina state senator David Hoyle wants to save North Carolina cities from themselves.  Proclaiming that “cities are getting into the broadband business with little or no experience and competing with private enterprise who pay the taxes,” Hoyle continues his push to put a stop to municipal broadband projects in North Carolina.

A week after Hoyle and a few allies on the Revenue Laws Study Committee pushed forward a draft bill that would require public referendums that could be triggered even when making basic repairs to community-owned fiber networks, IndyWeek reports Hoyle doesn’t exactly come to the debate with clean hands.

Rebekah Cowell, in a piece called “Hoyle to municipal broadband: Drop Dead,” notes Time Warner Cable’s PAC contributed $6,000 to Hoyle’s final campaign in 2009.

Hoyle told Cowell he is not swayed by Time Warner Cable’s deep involvement in pushing the legislation forward, despite the generous contribution to his campaign coffers.

“The lobbyists don’t influence me,” he said. “I’m in the pocket of the people that provide jobs for this state, and Time Warner Cable employs 8,500 in this state, and I can’t imagine any one that would want to compete with that.”

Time Warner Cable told IndyWeek it doesn’t philosophically oppose municipal broadband projects, and claims Hoyle’s bill would only apply to a city that chooses to take taxpayer money to build a competing network as if it were a private provider. “We just believe that they should have to operate under the same rules as the private provider,” Melissa Buscher, director of media relations at Time Warner Cable told Cowell. “We do believe people in the community should have a say-so in how large amounts of public monies are spent.”

Yet the legislation proposed by Hoyle actually impacts projects that receive no public taxpayer dollars.  Under his proposal, any municipal project seeking private bondholders has to endure an endless series of referendums on everything from initial system approval, construction, refinancing debt, extending service, upgrading the network, and even when basic system repairs are needed.

Time Warner Cable’s concern for public tax dollars only seems to extend to their potential competitors.  The cable operator itself gratefully accepted public tax dollars from the state Department of Commerce, the city of Charlotte, and the county of Mecklenburg to construct a $29 million dollar headquarters building in Charlotte.  Even in smaller communities, the cable operator enjoyed benefits from taxpayers who didn’t have a “say-so in how public monies are spent.”  In December, Marble Cliff Village Council approved an economic development agreement with Time Warner Communications including a five-year tax abatement worth $100,000.

North Carolina’s phone companies also benefit from state taxpayers.  As IndyWeek reports:

A 2009 analysis by Democracy North Carolina [shows] two telecommunications companies, AT&T and Embarq, both benefited from tax breaks on the purchases of telephone equipment that costs the state an estimated $31 million annually in lost revenue. In 2008, political action committees for AT&T and Embarq contributed $140,500 and $151,250, respectively, to legislative candidates, statewide candidates and party committees.

Hoyle apparently has no problem with losing that tax revenue.

Hoyle’s claims that municipal broadband projects hurt North Carolina consumers are untrue in cities like Wilson, the only community in North Carolina that successfully avoided a Time Warner Cable rate increase this year.

Time Warner customers in Wilson are benefiting from Greenlight’s competition. According to a December 2009 presentation before the House Select Committee on High Speed Internet Access in Rural and Urban Areas, Time Warner raised its prices for basic service in the Triangle—as much as 52 percent in Cary—but did not impose any rate hike in Wilson. Nor did the company increase prices in Wilson for the digital sports and games tier, while Triangle customers paid 41 percent more.

Cable and broadband consultant Catharine Rice of Action Audits gave the presentation; she advocates for municipalities that want to build their own networks.

The bill could hurt Wilson’s Greenlight service, even though it’s been installed. “The way the legislation is worded, and how I interpret it,” says Ovittore, “is that if the city of Wilson … had a resident who was digging in their yard—let’s say putting a new mailbox in—and accidentally damaged a strand of fiber, before that strand could be repaired the city would have to go through a referendum and vote, spending endless taxpayer dollars.”

A public referendum could also be required if Wilson wanted to connect an additional household to their existing system, Ovittore said.

Hoyle says that of the $30 million to build the network, Wilson used $12 million of it from the utility account. “People there are raising hell about their electricity bill, and it’s just not right,” he said.

Brian Bowman, Wilson’s public affairs manager, said the city borrowed the $28 million on the private market. As for Hoyle’s $12 million figure, Bowman said, much less—only $3.6 million— had been set aside from the electric fund by City Council in 1989; it was re-designated in 1999. “It has always been part of our funding package,” he said. As for the electric bills, Bowman said they were higher earlier this year because of the particularly cold winter, not the cost of the network.

Wilson accomplished its municipal broadband system without spending a nickle of taxpayer money.  Other North Carolina communities considering similar projects would run into overwhelming problems overcoming Hoyle’s telecom-friendly legislation because of its referendum requirements.

Hoyle told IndyWeek he doesn’t see the need for such projects anyway, claiming fast broadband is already universally available across the state.

“I’ve heard that BS, and it’s just not true—period,” he said. “Anybody that needs service has got served in this state and will continue to get served.”

Hoyle’s words sound a lot like those of Time Warner Cable, which also contends broadband availability is not an issue. “Based on a map of the state done in 2009 by Connected Nation, more than 92 percent of homes in North Carolina have broadband available to them,” said Buscher. “A vast majority of those have two wireline providers, some have wireless providers, plus satellite offers broadband to literally every home in the state. This isn’t an availability issue. Anyone who wants Internet service can get it today.”

Those claims are dubious. Chatham County Commissioner Tom Vanderbeck has advocated for rural broadband access since 2006 in an area where pockets still have only dial-up and DSL. Vanderbeck was recently appointed by the General Assembly to serve on the e-NC Authority, which promotes statewide rural broadband. He calls Hoyle’s bill anti-competitive, one that would discriminate against local government.

[…]

“Requiring a vote, when you have deep pockets that can fight it and put up as much money as they want, while making the project sound like a waste of taxpayer dollars—that would be a tragedy,” she adds.

Anyone who proclaims satellite fraudband represents a credible broadband competing alternative should be forced to use it.

Connected Nation, which Buscher relies on for her numbers, has a board dominated by telecommunications company executives, particularly AT&T.  With their private provider-stacked leadership, they can draw the maps anyway they please, particularly in ways that suggest there isn’t a broadband problem in North Carolina… or anywhere else.  Not as long as they are running it.

While the Federal Communications Commission hand-wrings over how far to dip its toe into the shark-infested water of corporate-controlled broadband, Finland has launched a major investigation over charges of price-fixing and collusion by the country’s major broadband providers.

The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA), equivalent to the Federal Communications Commission or the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, started the investigation over what it calls “gross overpricing” after receiving complaints from TeliaSonera that it was forced to pay outrageously high “local loop” prices to the former state-owned incumbent telephone company, Elisa Oyj.

The “local loop” refers to a part of a telecommunications network used for providing broadband subscriptions to end-customers. When an operator sells broadband outside its own operating area, it must lease part of a local loop from the operating area’s telecom operator. The sound pricing of the local loop market is a prerequisite for telecom operators to be able to compete in each other’s operating areas and thus be able to provide inexpensive broadband services to consumers.

“The authority has discovered flaws and problems in the pricing of several telecom operators, and there is even reason to suspect that unlawful activity occurs in the broadband market,” FICORA said in a statement.

Within three months, Elisa must reduce its pricing to a level based on actual costs and deliver new price tariffs and cost calculations to FICORA. According to FICORA’s calculations, the unreasonability of pricing is significant. For example, the monthly price of a local loop must be reduced by more than 20 percent.

“The objective of the provisions is to prevent operators with significant market power from enjoying a monopolistic pricing capability, promote competition and thereby ensure versatile and reasonably-priced telecom services for citizens,” FICORA states.

Finland telecommunications law does not allow corporate providers to gain the upper hand over consumers.  FICORA aggressively oversees the Finnish broadband market to ensure no individual company or group of companies can collude to set prices artificially high, discourage competition, or deliver sub-standard service in non-competitive areas.

Finland was the first country in the world to declare broadband a universal right, and every citizen should have access to at least 1Mbps service no later than this July.  By 2015, Finland plans to deliver universal access to at least 100Mbps service.  Finland is a world leader in broadband adoption — as of 2007 a full 79 percent of Finns regularly access the Internet.  With universal access a national priority, FICORA referees the private marketplace to make sure the Finnish people benefit the most from the broadband revolution.

The Authority has warned other operators to either voluntarily review their pricing, or face the potential consequences of further investigations extending into the summer and autumn of this year.

(This piece is written by Jay Ovittore and Phillip Dampier.)

The good news is that all the pushback on an all-out-moratorium on municipal broadband was successful and Senator David Hoyle (D-Gaston) withdrew the idea.  The bad news is he had an even worse idea to replace it.

Hoyle Wednesday unveiled a new draft bill that hopelessly ties up municipal broadband projects into knots of red tape that, if passed into law, will bury municipal broadband projects in North Carolina indefinitely.

Hoyle sprung his telecom-industry-friendly legislation on the public after getting plenty of input and encouragement from the state’s cable and phone companies who already knew what was in it because they helped craft it.

For a retiring state senator who doesn’t have to worry about the next election, what better parting gift can you give to your friends in the cable and phone industry than a bill that preserves the comfortable duopoly they’ve  enjoyed for years.

Hoyle and those supporting the legislation will argue their bill doesn’t ban municipal broadband — it simply places conditions on such projects before they can go forward.  But what are those conditions?

Section One of the draft bill requires local governments to get funding for “external communications services” (ie. municipal broadband) by way of a General Obligation Bond (a GO Bond).  In North Carolina, that requires a taxpayer-funded referendum to be held for public input at the next election.

On the surface, getting public approval for municipal broadband isn’t a bad idea — no local government official expecting to win re-election would ever proceed on such projects without voter support.  But this requirement also gives plenty of advance notice to incumbent providers that a new player could be invading their turf.

We know what that means.  A well-funded opposition campaign to demagogue the project.  Local cable companies can insert an unlimited number of free ads during every advertising break to slam the proposal.  Phone companies can release a blizzard of opposition mailers to convince consumers it’s as scary as Halloween — all tricks and no treats.

How can a local city or county government respond to the misinformation barrage?  They can’t.  Public officials can’t spend taxpayer dollars to promote such projects or refute industry propaganda.  They can’t even financially assist a citizen-run campaign.

That’s a fight with ground rules only Don King could love.

In the end, that leaves ordinary citizens of North Carolina facing down a multi-billion dollar statewide consortium of telecommunications interests hellbent on preserving and protecting the status qu0.

The earlier-discussed moratorium was a brick wall against municipal broadband.  Hoyle’s bill is the Great Wall of China with the logos of AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and CenturyLink plastered all over it.

But wait, there’s more.  To deal with municipal broadband projects that got an initial green light to dare to interfere with the phone and cable industries’ grand business plans, another provision provides a near endless supply additional referendums to get rid of the projects.  Hoyle’s bill actually demands more votes should existing systems need:

• refinancing to reduce the interest rate or restructure existing debt;
• to make repairs to the system’s “fixtures;” and/or
• to upgrade the system to meet subscribers’ needs.

Ponder the insanity:

• The legislation could be interpreted to demand a public referendum if your service goes out.  Can you wait until the next election to get back your cable service?
• If a municipal broadband fiber cable falls in your backyard, does it make a sound?  It won’t, but you will when you learn that cable might not be reattached to the pole until the whole town holds a referendum about it;
• Would you be upset if your local municipal provider could refinance its debt at a much lower interest rate, letting them cut their prices, but they can’t before the next election?
• While cable and phone companies refuse to upgrade their service to levels that would have made such municipal alternatives unnecessary, they also want to make certain the one provider that did meet your needs can’t upgrade… without a public vote.

These systems are not constructed with public tax dollars, but Senator Hoyle wants every citizen in a community, subscriber or not, to ponder the future of a local municipal broadband provider.  It’s like giving AT&T veto power over Time Warner Cable’s channel lineup.  Guess who has to pay for these constant referendums?  Taxpayers.  So while Senator Hoyle complains municipal broadband costs the state tax revenue, his legislation guarantees increased government spending on pointless referendums.  That’s logic only a politician working for the interests of big cable can appreciate.

For the cable and phone companies, and their good friends in the North Carolina legislature, this is their idea of a level playing field.  In reality it’s about as level as a downhill ski run.

Let’s extend that “fairness” out to incumbent cable and phone companies and consider whether you got a vote on:

• Whether or not the cable and phone companies got to put their wires on phone poles plunked down in front of your house;
• Whether or not you wanted either company to dig up your yard to bury their wiring;
• Whether you wanted that giant metal refrigerator-sized metal box installed on your street, in your yard, or on the phone pole you see from your window every day;
• Whether or not you want the cable company to repair Mrs. Jenkins’ problems with HBO up the street whenever it rains or replace the cable the squirrels chewed up;
• What channels and services you want to pay for, which ones you do not, and at what price you need to pay your local phone or cable company.
• What cable or phone company gets to provide service in your community.

Apparently the fairness concept only applies to potential new competitors, not the existing providers.

Let’s also consider the cable television industry didn’t just magically bloom into a multi-billion dollar business without government help.  In the early days of cable television, investors were assured that they were financing a monopoly provider, guaranteed through a franchise agreement process that gave newly built cable companies exclusivity to help repay construction costs.  Franchise wars broke out between 1978 and 1984 as competing companies promised the moon with state-of-the-art two-way cable systems with the capacity to offer 70 or more channels.  The players then included Time’s American Television and Communications Corporation, Warner’s Amex, and Telecommunications, Inc. (TCI).  ATC and Amex would later evolve into Time Warner Cable and TCI became AT&T Cable before being sold to Comcast.  Communities seeking cable television for their residents would later learn a lot of these promises made were promises broken – reneged on by large cable companies with few, if any consequences.

During the Reagan Administration, then-FCC Chairman Mark Fowler bestowed additional deregulation benefits on the cable industry.  The Museum of Broadcast Communications explains:

The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 addressed the two issues that still hindered cable television’s growth and profitability: rate regulation and the relative uncertainty surrounding franchise renewals. Largely the result of extensive negotiation and compromise between the cable industry’s national organization, the National Cable Television Association, and the League of Cities representing municipalities franchising cable systems, the act provided substantial comfort to the cable industry’s future.

Its major provisions created a standard procedure for renewing franchises that gave operators relatively certain renewal, and it deregulated rates so that operators could charge what they wanted for different service tiers as long as there was “effective competition” to the service. This was defined as the presence of three or more over-the-air signals, a very easy standard that over 90% of all cable markets could meet. The act also allowed cities to receive up to 5% of the operator’s revenues in an annual franchise fee and made some minor concessions in mandating “leased access” channels to be available to groups desiring to “speak” via cable television.

Additional reforms guaranteed pole attachment rights to the cable industry so they could wire and service their network unencumbered by utility company interference or high pole attachment fees.  Cable consolidation allowed formerly mom and pop cable systems to become part of a cable industry where just a handful of cable companies provide service to the majority of cable households.  Countless millions are spent each year by the industry to lobby state and federal governments to keep the party going without regulatory interference, suggesting competiti0n alone is the only regulation required.

Except when a new competitor enters the market, of course.  Fearing competition from municipal providers who will force cable and phone companies to charge reasonable rates and upgrade service, the best possible solution is to find a way to ban such projects.

Forcing regular referendums and the complexities and expenses associated with them guarantees no community in North Carolina would ever bother with the onerous requirements to launch municipal broadband projects.

That’s not just Jay and I saying that.  What Hoyle has proposed hardly breaks new ground.  It’s the same dog and pony show the industry has brought to other states to stop competition and keep prices high and service slow.

So let’s learn from the painful experiences of others:

First lobbying for legislation requiring referendums and then winning it, SBC (later AT&T) and Comcast used the opportunity to spend more than $300,000 of their subscribers’ money to launch a major misinformation campaign with misleading and inaccurate mailers that successfully fought off a proposition to deliver better and cheaper service through a municipal broadband project in Batavia, Geneva, and St. Charles, Illinois.  Fiber for Our Future documented the whole sordid affair from start to finish as a lesson to others confronting industry-backed referendum requirements.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/unproven.flv[/flv]

Want a preview of the distortion and misinformation-campaign cable and phone providers will bring to stop municipal broadband?  Watch this SBC (today AT&T) executive tell city officials in Illinois that fiber is “unproven,” that the phone company’s DSL speeds are comparable to Comcast Cable, and that consumers don’t need the 3Mbps speed the company was delivering back in 2004 when this video was taken.  “What are you going to do with 20 megabits.  I mean, it’s like having an Indy race car and you don’t have the race track to drive it on.”  (3 minutes)

Longmont, Colorado spent years suffering with bad broadband service from Comcast and Qwest and sought a better alternative with a municipally-run provider.  But then the cable and phone giants spent $200,000 to put a stop to that.  While local subscribers may have preferred that $200,000 be used to reduce their rates, for Comcast and Qwest it was an investment in maintaining future pricing only duopolies can achieve, all while delivering “good enough for you” broadband service to Longmont residents.  In 2006, the Baller Herbst Law Firm collected information on industry-backed barriers to municipal broadband, and the list went on for nine pages.  Many of them sound eerily familiar to what Hoyle proposes (after cable and phone companies whispered time tested, industry proven ideas into his ear).

The city of North St. Paul, Minnesota has advice for states like North Carolina after their own experience with a coordinated industry-backed smear campaign against municipal broadband enabled by legislation similar to what Hoyle proposes:

What should be of interest to all communities was the organized opposition.  It appears that the incumbent providers, industry associations and politically conservative think tanks teamed up to promote negative news stories, do polling and opposition phone calls, provide transportation for identified “no” voters and create web sites.

While we heard some advocates lamenting this high priced anti-municipal fiber effort, this response is something that community leaders must expect and be prepared for.  A strong community education and mobilization effort must be a part of any municipal telecommunications initiative.  A coalition of business owners and residents must be created and maintained that can counter the expected efforts of the incumbent providers.  The benefits of the community-owned network should be documented and promoted so that an overwhelming majority of voters will choose to vote yes.  We hope that, one way or the other, North St. Paul gets the “More, Better Broadband” that the MN Broadband Coalition supports.

Of course, when local communities are banned from spending a nickel on advocacy for their projects, it effectively hands a restraining order to broadband advocates who can’t even get on the playing field, level or otherwise.

Outraged yet?

It will only get worse if Hoyle’s bill ever becomes law.  Residents in communities like Salisbury endured a sampling of the kind of negative campaign this industry will launch wherever municipal broadband competition threatens to appear.  In 2009, residents were hassled with push-polling phone calls from industry-backed astroturf groups claiming to represent ordinary citizens, but were actually little more than sock puppets for big telecom.  Your mailbox will be filled with blizzards of misleading mailers that current cable and phone customers pay for.  If they need more money, they can always raise your rates to cover the difference.  In the end, with the help of elected officials who don’t care about North Carolina consumers, existing municipal projects can bleed themselves dry (later to be used by the industry as “failed examples” to claim such projects are too risky to try) and proposed ones will never see a spade plunged into the soil to bury the first strand of fiber optic cable.

But it’s not all bad news.  It doesn’t have to happen this way.  You can tell your state representative you are watching them like a hawk on this issue.  Any “yes” vote for legislation like that proposed by Senator Hoyle is a no vote for them at the next election.  Let them know you are well aware of the game plan here — it has been tried in other states with similar legislation that is little more than protectionism for big telecom. Tell your elected officials you already have the power to choose whether or not you want these projects simply by voting for or against the elected officials that propose them.  While the concept of a referendum sounds fair on the surface, it’s not when you consider the past experiences of other communities who faced well-funded opposition campaigns, helpless to correct the record or fairly argue their position on the matter.  Providers know that, which is why they advocate this type of legislation in the first place.  It effectively stops competition, stops better service, and stops North Carolina residents from enjoying lower priced cable, phone, and broadband service.

There are a few stand-up representatives of the people of North Carolina who do deserve our gratitude and thanks today.

Rep. Paul Luebke, (D-Durham County) (who co-chairs the Revenue Law Study Committee) [email protected] 919-733-7663 College Teacher

Rep. Jennifer Weiss, (D-Wake County) [email protected] 919-715-3010 Lawyer-Mom

They both will likely face fierce opposition from the incumbent providers and their fellow legislators. Please take the time to thank them for standing with consumers today and for trying to protect the future of North Carolina and its economy.

Stop the Cap! will have video of today’s remarks by both legislators soon.  We hope to follow with a complete video record of today’s events surrounding the anti-competition legislation proposed by Senator Hoyle.  It will serve as a testament to just how much work we have to do to remove legislators who have stopped representing the public interest, and renew our support for those who stand with consumers.

Meanwhile, check out these two delightful pieces paid for by the cable and phone industry, sent to homes where municipal broadband projects faced a referendum in 2003 and 2004.  More than a dozen different mailers were sent to every home in the communities of Batavia, Geneva, and St. Charles, Illinois from phone and cable companies.  Now imagine the repercussions when not one of those communities could respond with their own mailers correcting the record and giving their side of the argument.  There is a reason why special interests spend enormous sums of money to protect their turf, and the battle is over before it even begins when those interests demand the other side not have the opportunity to respond in kind.

What smears do providers in North Carolina have in store for you?

… Continue Reading