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El Reg reports
Voters in Colorado have abolished laws that had prohibited local governments from offering their own broadband internet services.
Local ballots in 17 counties all resulted in voters electing to allow their local governments to offer broadband service in competition with private cable companies. The vote overturns a 2005 law that prevented any government agency from competing in the broadband space.
[...] According to The Denver Post , the 17 counties have differing reasons for overturning the rule. Some areas want to build their own broadband infrastructure, while others simply want to offer Wi-Fi service in public buildings or improve service for farming communities.
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Colorado Voters Abolish Ban on Government-Owned Broadband
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 06 2015, @03:29PM
The thing is, most places where the people want their local government to build that "last mile", there is no competition. None of the major providers are willing to build it, because the return on investment will only be a small fraction of what they can get in more populated areas. So, there is no broadband, unless the people in the community build it themselves.
Screw the competition.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 06 2015, @09:41PM
A simpler solution would be require they build that last mile if they want to operate in your state. Frankly though, none of the telecom mergers should ever have been allowed after deregulation. That and requiring either two competitors or regulation would solve the problem.
The government's job in capitalism is not to sell laws to big players that minimize competition but to encourage, nay require, competition. Or at the very least to stay out of the way of it. Ours has done neither because they are utterly corrupt fuckwads.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Saturday November 07 2015, @10:44AM
The government's job in capitalism is not to sell laws to big players that minimize competition but to encourage, nay require, competition.
Actually, the government's job in capitalism is what society (or in this case, the wallets of the big corporations and their political lapdogs) decides that it is.
cf. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism [wordpress.com]
From the first "thing":
The above is intuitively obvious if you bother to think about it *at all*. Regulation (and mostly by *governments* even!) is at the heart of every market you can name.
Think about it for yourself. If there wasn't any regulation or rules in a market of any size or complexity, chaos would ensue. Bad regulation (which is what you refer to above) can have hugely negative effects on markets, as we've seen.
But taking the simplistic view that the government should ensure competition and nothing else and/or that regulation of any kind is inherently bad is patently false.
I realize I've gone off on a tangent here -- I do agree that regulation should require strong competition, but regulation must also set the boundaries of the market as well as ensure that the players (producers and consumers) can interact on a fairly even basis. We've fallen down badly in that respect in many ways and in many markets.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr