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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:
Gov. Jim Hunt
INFORMATION HIGHWAYS ANNOUNCEMENT
Governor Jim Hunt
May 10, 1993
Today North Carolina takes a giant step forward into our future.
This Fall, North Carolina will link up the most advanced telecommunications network of its kind in the world — a network that will ensure that the state will be a leader in the 21st century.
The network will reach into every corner of our great state. It will connect our cities with our towns, our schoolhouses and our courthouses, our hospitals and clinics — our people all across the state.
Early in this century, North Carolina came to be known as the “Good Roads State.” We discovered a new technology — and started paving roads. Those roads began moving people and products in ways never before possible.
Today we reach out for a new technology — a new kind of highway. The North Carolina Information Highway.
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!
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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