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from the mama-don't-allow-no-competition-'round-here dept.
TechDirt reports
Wilson, North Carolina's Greenlight [publicly-owned ISP], has had to disconnect one neighboring town or face violating state law. With state leaders tone deaf to the problem of letting incumbent ISPs write such laws, and the FCC flummoxed [by a federal court] in its attempt to help, about 200 home Internet customers in [the town of] Pinetops will thus lose access to gigabit broadband service as of October 28
[...] Greenlight's fiber network provides speeds of 40Mbps to 1Gbps at prices ranging from $40 to $100 a month, service that's unheard of from any of the regional incumbent providers (AT&T, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable) that lobbied for the protectionist law. Previously, the community of Pinetops only had access to sluggish DSL Service from CenturyLink.
Related:
Muni ISP forced to shut off fiber-to-the-home Internet after court ruling (Ars Technica)
Previous: Appeals Court Rules the FCC Cannot Override State Laws Banning Municipal ISPs
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @11:23PM
The Articles of Confederation were replaced with the Constitution after the Constitutional Congress as a direct result of each state trying to pull one over on other members of the Confederacy. They were all broke or indebted states. Some printed far more scrip than their economies could repay/support, many would not take the currency of their neighboring communities, etc.
Now the question to be made could be how many of the 'average citizens' were involved in that, rather than the merchants, political elite, and other wealthy or privileged individuals, but in the end the result is the same: Looser control failed because the US had indebted itself heavily to win its revolution, and did not collectively do what was necessary to un-indebt the whole or enrich the impoverished masses (many revolutionary veterans debts were unpaid up to 10 years after the war. Many were required to repay interest incurred during the course of their service in the revolutionary war. The merchants did the same then that they just did in 2008. Had the masses pay for their own overexpenditures while returning little to the indebted masses.
The true irony is that while the centralization eventually helped improve the economy by regaining trade with europe, the majority of what improved the industry was industrial espionage and lack of respect for foreign intellectual property laws (see the cotton gin, and a variety of steam engine and other technology stolen from britain and other european countries in order to elevate the expanding colonial us as a whole.)