Not a problem

Who knew America’s largest cable and phone companies were in the broadband shortage business?

Broadband evangelist Craig Settles has been as outraged about this year’s crop of anti-broadband legislation as we have here at Stop the Cap!

He wrote about the implications of allowing state laws to be changed in favor of the big cable and phone companies in a piece published by GigaOM that details where these anti-community Internet bills are coming from:

This push is brought to you by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group of corporate lobbyists who ghostwrite state bills behind closed doors that their pocket legislators then push on the floor. This “model” of anti-muni broadband legislation contains wording that is replicated in these latest bills and newspaper op-eds that attack community broadband.

Many of the nation’s largest phone and cable companies funnel funds into ALEC, and even sponsor wine-and-dine trips for state legislators and their families as part of a comprehensive effort to get their foot (and later proposed legislation) in the door.

Download this archive of ALEC-written and sponsored state legislation/policies affecting telecommunications and IT.  (16mb .zip file)

Few state legislators fully realize the implications of some of these measures, which can hamstring their state’s broadband networks into “good enough for you” broadband, as determined by Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and others.

ALEC’s dog-and-pony show opens with its corporate backers enhancing their campaign contributions to legislators likely to support their agenda.  ALEC’s lobbyists can then provide “boilerplate” templates for legislation that can be slightly modified and introduced at the state level for consideration.

With a significant increase in campaign contributions targeting friendly legislators, community broadband suddenly becomes a hot topic at the statehouse.

Legislators do not work alone to pass these measures.  As we’ve seen in other states, industry-backed lobbying firms deliver a comprehensive set of support services for the campaign to stop community broadband competition:

1. Talking points for legislators and others opposed to municipal Internet;
2. Professionally produced mailers that can be distributed to every home in a community bashing community networks;
3. Sample letters to the editor intended for local newspapers and easy-to-send letters to legislators asking them to support anti-broadband legislation;
4. Help from seemingly “independent” outside groups that criticize such networks, without disclosing their funding comes, in part or whole, from the cable or phone company.

Settles

Being hoodwinked by the companies that want these kinds of bills passed leave your community’s broadband needs entirely in the hands of providers that have performed so poorly in some cities, local governments have decided they have to provide the service themselves.  Settles illustrates the obvious:

This isn’t about unfair competition by local government. When Wilson’s 12-person IT department can plan, build and manage a network that can deliver speeds (up to a gig) 20 times faster than the best Time Warner Cable offers, that’s competing with superior technology. When Comcast customers switch to Chattanooga’s gig network because of their public utility’s better customer service, that’s competent competition. When tiny Reedsburg, Wis. refuses to compete against the large cable company on price, but beats competitors by offering greater value such as a better selection of Internet services, they compete based on local credibility.

So U.S. communities have to ask themselves, are they going to stay stuck on the train or will they be zipping along at warp speed?

Providers and their industry friends will always argue that you don’t need gigabit broadband speed — what you get from your cable or phone company today is “fast enough.”  Some go as far as to argue current providers are equipped to deliver whatever service customers need, but the demand “just is not there.”

Big Problem.

But as we argued on GigaOM ourselves, the nation’s largest telecom companies have already proven they apparently cannot meet the demand that exists today.  That is because an increasing number of them have started to slap arbitrary usage caps and other limits on their customers’ broadband usage.  Customers don’t want these Internet Overcharging schemes, yet they persist because of what providers effectively admit is a broadband shortage on their networks.

So for a city like Chattanooga, Tenn., which of the following providers should be punished (and potentially even banned) for being in the broadband business:

1. AT&T, which delivers around 6-7Mbps DSL in suburban Chattanooga or up to 24Mbps on its U-verse platform with 150GB/250GB usage limits respectively;
2. Comcast, which delivers up to 50Mbps over cable broadband with a 250GB usage cap;
3. EPB Fiber, which delivers up to 1,000Mbps over fiber optics with no usage cap.

If you are AT&T or Comcast, clearly the provider that must be stopped is #3 — EPB Fiber.  After all, you can’t be in the broadband shortage business when the competitor next door offers a broadband free-for-all made possible from an investment in a superior network that exists to serve customers, not shareholders and investment banks.

Phillip "Break Free from 'What's In It For Me'-AT&T" Dampier

[We are reprinting this because it succinctly and persuasively proves a point we’ve been making at Stop the Cap! since 2008.  Broadband is not just a “nice thing to have.” It is as important as a phone line, electricity, and safe drinking water.  News, education, commerce, and culture increasingly utilize the Internet to share information and entertain us. Essential utility services can either be provided by a private company operating as a monopoly with oversight and regulation, or operate strictly in the public interest in the form of a customer-owned cooperative, a direct service of local government, or a quasi-public independent non-profit.

In North America, broadband was originally considered a non-essential service, and private providers in the United States lobbied heavily to maintain absolute control of their broadband networks, free to open them to share with other providers, or not.  They also won sweeping deregulation and are still fighting today for decreased oversight.  The results have been uneven service.  Large, compact cities enjoy modern and fast broadband while smaller communities are forced to live with a fraction of the speeds offered elsewhere, if they have access to the service at all.

With broadband now deemed “essential,” local governments have increasingly sought to end the same old excuses with the “don’t care”-cable company or “what’s in it for me”-AT&T and provide 21st century service themselves, especially where local commercial providers simply won’t step up to the plate at all.  Suddenly, big cable and phone companies are more possessive than your last boy/girlfriend. The companies that for years couldn’t care less about your broadband needs suddenly obsess when someone else moves in on “their territory.” They want special laws (that apply only to the competition) to make sure your broadband future lies exclusively in their hands.

Susan P. Crawford understand how this dysfunctional, controlling relationship comes at the expense of rural America.  She’s a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School. In 2009, she was a special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology and innovation policy. Her opinions were originally shared with readers of Bloomberg News.]

In cities and towns across the U.S., a familiar story is replaying itself: Powerful companies are preventing local governments from providing an essential service to their citizens. More than 100 years ago, it was electricity. Today, it is the public provision of communications services.

Susan Crawford

The Georgia legislature is currently considering a bill that would effectively make it impossible for any city in the state to provide for high-speed Internet access networks — even in areas in which the private sector cannot or will not. Nebraska, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee already have similar laws in place. South Carolina is considering one, as is Florida.

Mayors across the U.S. are desperate to attract good jobs and provide residents with educational opportunities, access to affordable health care, and other benefits that depend on affordable, fast connectivity — something that people in other industrialized countries take for granted. But powerful incumbent providers such as AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. are hamstringing municipalities.

At the beginning of the 20th century, private power companies electrified only the most lucrative population centers and ignored most of America, particularly rural America. By the mid-1920s, 15 holding companies controlled 85 percent of the nation’s electricity distribution, and the Federal Trade Commission found that the power trusts routinely gouged consumers.

Costly and Dangerous

In response, and recognizing that cheap, plentiful electricity was essential to economic development and quality of life, thousands of communities formed electric utilities of their own. Predictably, the private utilities claimed that public ownership of electrical utilities was “costly and dangerous” and “always a failure,” according to the November 1906 issue of Moody’s Magazine. Now more than 2,000 communities in the U.S., including Seattle, San Antonio and Los Angeles, provide their own electricity.

Today, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for community broadband initiatives, is tracking more than 60 municipal governments that have built or are building successful fiber networks, just as they created electric systems during the 20th century. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, the city’s publicly owned electric company provides fast, affordable and reliable fiber Internet access. Some businesses based in Knoxville — 100 miles to the northeast — are adding jobs in Chattanooga, where connectivity can cost an eighth as much.

Meanwhile, less than 8 percent of Americans currently receive fiber service to their homes, compared with more than 50 percent of households in South Korea, and almost 40 percent in Japan. Where it’s available, Americans pay five or six times as much for their fiber access as people in other countries do. Fully a third of Americans don’t subscribe to high-speed Internet access at all, and AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said last month that the company was “trying to find a broadband solution that was economically viable to get out to rural America, and we’re not finding one, to be quite candid.” America is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity.

Tamping Down Enthusiasm

We've done something like this once before.

Like the power trusts of the 20th century, the enormous consolidated providers of wired Internet access want to tamp down any enthusiasm for municipal networks. Last year, telecom lobbyists spent more than $300,000 in a failed effort to block a referendum in Longmont, Colorado, to allow that city to provide Internet access. Time Warner Cable managed to get a North Carolina law enacted last year that makes launching municipal networks there extraordinarily difficult. The pending measures in Georgia and South Carolina are modeled on the North Carolina bill.

The Georgia bill is chock-full of sand traps and areas of deep statutory fog from which no local public network is likely ever to emerge. In addition to the ordinary public hearings that any municipality would hold on the subject, a town looking to build a public network would have to hold a referendum. It wouldn’t be allowed to spend any money in support of its position (there would be no such prohibition on the deep-pocketed incumbents). The community wouldn’t be allowed to support its network with local taxes or surplus revenues from any other services (although incumbents routinely and massively subsidize their networks with revenue from other businesses).

Most pernicious of all, the public operator would have to include in the costs of its service the phantom, imputed “capital costs” and “taxes” of a private provider. This is a fertile area for disputes, litigation and delay, as no one knows what precise costs and taxes are at issue, much less how to calculate these amounts. The public provider would also have to comply with all laws and “requirements” applicable to “the communications service,” if it were made available by “a private provider,” although again the law doesn’t specify which service is involved or which provider is relevant.

The end result of all this vague language will be to make it all but impossible for a city to obtain financing to build its network. Although the proponents of Georgia’s bill claim that they are merely trying to create a level playing field, these are terms and conditions that no new entrant, public or private, can meet — and that the incumbents themselves do not live by. You can almost hear the drafters laughing about how impossible the entire enterprise will be.

Globally Competitive Networks

Right now, state legislatures — where the incumbents wield great power — are keeping towns and cities in the U.S. from making their own choices about their communications networks. Meanwhile, municipalities, cooperatives and small independent companies are practically the only entities building globally competitive networks these days. Both AT&T and Verizon have ceased the expansion of next-generation fiber installations across the U.S., and the cable companies’ services greatly favor downloads over uploads.

Congress needs to intervene. One way it could help is by preempting state laws that erect barriers to the ability of local jurisdictions to provide communications services to their citizens.

Running for president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized the right of communities to provide their own electricity. “I might call the right of the people to own and operate their own utility a birch rod in the cupboard,” he said, “to be taken out and used only when the child gets beyond the point where more scolding does any good.” It’s time to take out that birch rod.

Openmedia.ca's campaign against increased government surveillance

Two weeks ago, Ontario Provincial Police arrested at least 60 people in connection with one of the largest child pornography rings ever seen in the country.

Under current Canadian law, authorities obtained warrants to identify names associated with the IP addresses police say were engaged in the trade of lurid sexual imagery of minors, as well as recruiting potential new victims in online chat rooms and social networks.

Provincial police were able to identify at least five dozen suspects within the province and successfully staged a coordinated raid in Windsor, London, Toronto, Barrie, Niagara, Sudbury and Ottawa, charging them with more than 200 criminal offenses.

But some lawmakers believe existing privacy laws are inadequate and hamper police investigations, and plan to allow authorities new latitude in chasing down online crime.

An “Act to enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to amend the Criminal Code and other acts” is scheduled to be introduced in Parliament later today, and some of its supporters are attacking online privacy advocates of being “pro-child porn” if they oppose the measure.

“He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers,” Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said to one government critic of the new privacy bill.

The proposed legislation is nothing new — similar bills have come and gone through Ottawa for a few years now. Most seek to demolish the pesky and inconvenient process of obtaining a warrant to compel service providers to hand over personal information about those police are investigating. If the new legislation passes, providers will be able to track every call you make and every website you visit:

• Require ISPs to provide, on request, your name, IP address(es), device identification numbers that allow authorities to track your cell phone and/or modem, and all contact information including unlisted phone numbers;
• Require manufacturers and Internet providers to install “back door” access, allowing on-demand surveillance without a warrant;
• Allow authorities limitless access to archived data including e-mail and other communications logs providers store;
• Compel other parties to preserve and produce electronic evidence, such as received e-mail, online order histories and other financial transactions.

Together, these new police powers would allow the government to engage in real-time surveillance of your phone calls and online activity without any court supervision or oversight. If it turns out you were unlucky enough to secure an IP address that was formerly used by a subject of an investigation, authorities could begin digging into your background and potentially charge you with an unrelated crime if they happen to find something not part of their original investigation.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC Online surveillance critics accused of supporting child porn 2-13-12.flv[/flv]

CBC News outlines Canada’s latest effort to broaden online surveillance powers and the ensuing controversy. (2 minutes)

Online privacy advocates call the new legislation chilling, and are unpersuaded by supporters who think the process of obtaining a court-issued warrant is too burdensome and time consuming.

When pressed by the media, law enforcement officials have yet to identify a single criminal investigation hampered or delayed by current privacy laws, which require police to obtain sufficient evidence to convince a judge an invasion of privacy is warranted to pursue a criminal investigation. With this new legislation, authorities could launch endless “fishing expeditions” of those they suspect might be involved in a crime, but lack evidence to pursue. Even more concerning is that national security agencies could monitor political opponents, protest organizations, and other groups deemed threatening by the current government.

Proponents say such abuses are unthinkable and the bill is no more threatening than issuing an IP “phone book” for authorities, showing who is using what IP address. But Michael Geist details the legislation is much more than its backers would have you believe.

Without any proof current law is insufficient to handle criminal cases like the one noted above, it is prudent to reject this bill and avoid handing the government unchecked new powers of surveillance. That some in government are willing to play the ‘you are with us or with the child predator’-card as part of reasoned debate is as reprehensible as those in Washington who accused opponents of broad new surveillance powers after 9/11 as being “with the terrorists.”

For more information and to sign a petition opposing the measure, visit Openmedia.ca’s Stop Online Spying website.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Stop Online Spying.flv[/flv]

Openmedia.ca’s campaign against online spying includes three professionally-produced ads that put the bill in terms even technically-unaware Canadians will understand. (2 minutes)

Sen. Chip Rogers' vision of rural Georgia's broadband future

Sen. Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) thinks he knows broadband.  He, along with several other Georgia legislators well-compensated by some of the state’s largest telecom interests, have defined appropriate Internet speeds at a remarkably low “200 kilobits per second,” less than four times faster than your old AOL dial-up Internet account.  The one you canceled in 1998.

With a background like that, it was no surprise last Thursday when technology leaders and city representatives from across Georgia testified before the Senate Regulated Industries & Utilities Committee, strongly objecting to Rogers’ SB 313, a bill bought and paid for by the very companies the legislation would effectively protect from competition.

Rogers argues he wants to “level the playing field” between private providers that currently dominate broadband service in Georgia, and the long-suffering communities in rural areas that have waited for faster Internet since the Clinton Administration.

City officials from Dalton, Newnan, Elberton, Thomasville, Cartersville, LaGrange, Hogansville and Monroe collectively noted the proposed legislation hardly represents a level playing field when it fully exempts the bill’s backers from any of its provisions.  Thomasville mayor Max Beverly noted the same cable and phone companies that fiercely fought for statewide cable franchises for themselves now want to impose rules that forbid publicly-run companies from operating outside of their respective city limits.

“We would have to turn off service to the county’s two largest employers,” Thomasville Mayor Max Beverly told the Senate panel. “There is no telling what that would do to jobs in our area.”

Those testifying uniformly noted they entered the broadband business because private providers refused to deliver adequate service in their areas.

What community broadband provides communities the big phone and cable companies don't.

“We started our cable system not on a whim but on a demand from our citizens to provide a higher level of service for cable TV and Internet,” said Newnan Mayor Keith Brady. “We got into the cable business originally to provide fiber optics and broadband because Charter Communications would simply not invest in our community.”

Now cable and phone companies across Georgia are supporting legislation that would make that community service next to impossible to provide.

“The most ironic part of legislation like SB 313 is that cable and phone companies only take an interest in rural broadband when they ghostwrite bills like this to stop other people from providing the service themselves,” said Stop the Cap! reader Max Curr. “When I lived in Hiltonia, some of these same companies laughed at me when I asked about broadband. It simply was not profitable, they were not going to provide it, and with this bill, they will make sure it stays that way.”

But the cost to consumers extends way beyond the most rural corners of the state. SB 313 also hurts existing cable and phone customers who pay higher rates because of the lack of competition.  That assures the kind of anemic broadband Rogers and his friends in the cable and phone industries are only too happy to define as 200kbps.  At least that is 10kbps more than a similar bill being pushed by telephone and cable operators in South Carolina.

Brady says their community-owned system not only provides broadband where Charter would not, the cable company also was forced to reduce their rates for consumers in nearby communities, saving taxpayers across the entire city and county millions.

In Elberton, the lack of broadband was so pervasive the 4,700 local residents demanded the city provide the service themselves. Commercial providers had stonewalled the county seat of Elbert County for years until the city broke ground on a broadband project in 2001.

Dalton Utilities' CEO Don Cope (left), Newnan mayor Keith Brady (right) (Photo: Georgia Municipal Assn.)

Elberton City Manager Lanier Dunn complained SB 313 undercuts the rational definition of minimum Internet speeds to levels most Americans would not even consider “broadband.”  Dunn noted that the 2010 National Broadband Plan calls for download speeds 250 times greater, and by 2020 500 times greater, than what Rogers’ bill currently defines as broadband service.

“We should be reaching for higher and faster speeds, not relegating ourselves to barely just above dial-up,” Dunn said.

Don Cope, president and CEO of Dalton Utilities, demonstrated that municipal broadband systems are not the financial risk large telecommunications companies always claim they represent.  In fact, Dalton’s system has never received a penny of tax revenue and its accounting is open to public scrutiny to prove it.

Cope noted SB 313 imposes restrictions on community providers, but completely exempts those owned by the companies pushing the bill.

“I would ask that you look at the private providers in the state,” Cope said. “Look at their reports, and you would see how many dollars that are provided to them from the federal government. We are talking about in the billions of dollars. All the [private telecommunications entities] that I know about have some form of government support.”

Dalton isn’t the only city in Georgia with a successful community-owned operation.

The city of Newnan found their system such a valuable asset, they sold it at a profit to a private company in 2008 and used the proceeds to pay off its remaining construction costs.

Christmas in January.

AT&T and some of the company’s best friends in Congress have attached wireless America’s legislative wishlist to the must-pass Payroll Tax Bill that will temporarily reduce Social Security taxes for millions of Americans.  Now AT&T and other cell phone companies want their piece of the action.

Michael Weinberg at Public Knowledge has sounded the alarm attacks on Net Neutrality, spectrum auctions, and White Space Wi-Fi have turned up in amendments to a bill that Big Telecom is convinced must pass.  Weinberg explains:

No Net Neutrality Protections.  Forget your feelings about the FCC’s formal Open Internet Rules.  An amendment by Rep. Marsha Blackburn would prevent any restrictions on network management, block any requirements to make connectivity available on a wholesale basis (which would increase competition), and stop the FCC from passing a rule allowing users to attach any non-harmful device to the network.  As a result, the winner of the spectrum auction would be able to throttle, block, and discriminate however it sees fit – something that runs counter to any definition of network neutrality.

No Safeguards Against Further Consolidation.  It is no secret that one of the reasons that there are only four nationwide wireless carriers (and two dominant ones) is that only a few companies control most of the available spectrum in the United States.  This amendment would prevent the FCC from making sure that new spectrum goes towards new or under-provisioned competitors instead of being further consolidated by AT&T and Verizon.   That’s probably why AT&T is pushing so hard for this amendment.

No Super-Wifi.  One of the greatest boons of the transition from analog to digital TV broadcasting was supposed to be the creation of unlicensed “whitespaces” or “super-wifi.”  This new spectrum – which is much better at communicating long distances and through walls than current wifi spectrum – would be used cooperatively by everyone and usher in a new era of wireless devices.  However, a third amendment would destroy the FCC’s power to allocate some of this great spectrum for unlicensed uses.  That means that opportunity would simply pass us by.

Weinberg notes consumer advocates like Public Knowledge are now fighting all three amendments.  There are opportunities to strip them from the bill as it works its way through the legislative process.  Those backing the amendments hope the public doesn’t find out.

They just did.