{"id":177590,"date":"2019-08-09T19:42:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-10T00:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/08\/09\/speaking-of-cable-company-rat-fery\/"},"modified":"2019-08-09T19:42:00","modified_gmt":"2019-08-10T00:42:00","slug":"speaking-of-cable-company-rat-fery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/08\/09\/speaking-of-cable-company-rat-fery\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of Cable Company Rat-F%$#ery\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>People hate their internet companies.<\/div>\n<p>Whether it is Comcast, Charter, CenturyLink, Verizon, Frontier, etc. their business plan is all about creating and maintaining a monopoly, and then extracting rents with over-priced and under-performing internet.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s why US internet costs are among the highest in the developed world while having the lowest performance.<\/p>\n<p>The response of the incumbent providers has been to lobby to maintain their monopolies, doing things like forbidding municipal broadband.<\/p>\n<p>Well, it appears that their lobbying is losing its effectiveness, <a href=\"https:\/\/carolinapublicpress.org\/29203\/broadband-expansion-clears-nc-house-committee-despite-opposition\/\">even in Republican dominated states like North Carolina<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Broadband expansion legislation that stalled earlier this year after strong opposition from cable and telecommunications providers cleared a key N.C. House committee Thursday, but only after a long debate on the role of government in providing internet access. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncleg.gov\/Sessions\/2019\/Bills\/House\/PDF\/H431v2.pdf\">House Bill 431<\/a>, the FIBER NC Act, would eliminate existing state restrictions on local government investments in broadband infrastructure and put in place a system that would allow counties and municipalities to build out the infrastructure and then lease it to a private provider. <\/p>\n<p>Members of the State and Local Government Committee debated for an hour and half before approving the bill in a 13-9 vote. <\/p>\n<p>The majority, a mix of the committee\u2019s Democrats and a handful of Republican legislators from rural districts, also defeated an amendment to require a local referendum on public broadband investment by the same margin. <\/p>\n<p>The bill was introduced early in the session but has been opposed by the state\u2019s main internet providers, who say it is government encroachment into private enterprise.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>North Carolina might not be the last place where I would expect to see such a bill progressing, but it&#8217;s the second or third to last place where I would expect to see it.<\/p>\n<p>People are getting sick and tired of the looting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People hate their internet companies. Whether it is Comcast, Charter, CenturyLink, Verizon, Frontier, etc. their business plan is all about creating and maintaining a monopoly, and then extracting rents with over-priced and under-performing internet. It&#8217;s why US internet costs are among the highest in the developed world while having the lowest performance. The response of &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[367,479,374,437],"class_list":["post-177590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-internet","tag-monopoly","tag-politics","tag-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}