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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: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Wednesday September 21 2016, @12:41PM
In your example there it is like pizza hut saying we might maybe possibly might maybe put a pizza hut in your town but probably wont unless you give us huge sums of cash and tax breaks. So you make your own gov grown pizza place and then pizza hut comes along and says 'no fair'. No fair to WHAT? You were not going to do jack shit anyway. You are literally out nothing. You do not even have a loss in opportunity cost.
These small ass towns do not *want* to be in the broadband business. It honestly is a major pain to do and does not always work. They want to do other things. Instead the 4 companies that could have done it said 'no thanks' then got pissed when someone said 'fuck it we will do it ourselves'. Now these small towns have even more work to do. Just for the major ISPs to do exactly nothing more than obstruct people getting decent internet. Dont think so? They hire people to do exactly that.
This isn't just small towns either. You'd think that in city as large as NYC, the city would have some leverage, especially after handing out tax breaks and a cable franchise. What do you know, the evil ones fucked them over too [arstechnica.com].
If even NYC has a hard time reining this in, and the big communications companies own the state legislatures in places like North Carolina and Tennessee, what's a small town to do? Wilson, NC [wikipedia.org] has ~48,000 residents and a city budget of around US$250,000,000.00 [wilsonnc.org].
Even if the court case mentioned in TFA just addresses Tennessee and North Carolina laws, this is a nationwide problem. I imagine that many folks think that the FCC should mind its own beeswax, and maybe it should. Perhaps the U.S. Congress should get involved, but they seem to be too busy trying to dismantle Dodd-Frank and investigating people, rather than acting in the public interest and passing a budget, or maybe providing funding to the CDC for the Zika epidemic, or any number of other things that the people have an interest in, but their owners [wikipedia.org] wouldn't like that, would they?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 22 2016, @01:00AM
NYC has no doubt has that exact same issue. They also have a serious aging infrastructure problem. They have a horrible problem under their streets. They basically can not work on some sort of infrastructure without screwing up some secondary service. With 150+ years of wires and pipes all intertwined.