My Denver Rant on Anti-Municipal Broadband

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dave Hughes <dave () OLDCOLO COM>
Reply-To: Telecom Regulation & the Internet
<CYBERTELECOM-L () LISTSERV AOL COM>
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2005 07:47:14 -0600
To: <CYBERTELECOM-L () LISTSERV AOL COM>
Subject: My Denver Rant on Anti-Municipal Broadband

Today's Rocky Mountain News. After violent arguements with the editor Vince
Carrol, a knee jerk 'conservative'. Of course he dug up somebody against
municipal broadband to run it too.



http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_3704368
,00.html





Legislators answer Qwest's call to keep cities out of the 'Net business



By Dave Hughes
April 16, 2005



Half the bad laws enacted by the Colorado General Assembly come from
back-room political conspiracies. The other half are the results of utter
legislative incompetence.



A very bad law stemming from both causes is about to be enacted.



It is Senate Bill 152, which was approved by the state Senate on Friday and
now has to be reconciled with the House-approved version before being sent
to Gov. Bill Owens. The bill would gratuitously prohibit all Colorado
municipalities from providing a high-speed Internet service to their
citizens, and managing it like a public utility or any other essential
public service. They are being barred from offering it either by themselves
or in joint venture with others, regardless of whether it can pay for
itself.



Why would any Colorado town or city want to do that? It's because they more
clearly understand than any of our dense urban legislators that the future
Colorado economy among their constituents - manufacturing, marketing,
farming and ranching, as well as medicine, education, and even distance
learning from farms ranches and cabins - is ever more dependent on the
Internet. Those 125 or more rural Colorado towns are sick and tired of
waiting for the worst regional telephone company in America - Qwest - to
deliver broadband services to them and thence to their citizens.



Qwest and its little brother, Comcast Cable, want only to cherry pick the
fat-cat suburbs, big businesses, downtown Denver, and other big metropolitan
areas. And block everybody else from competing.



Lawmakers themselves didn't come up with the weird Machiavellian scheme
contained in SB 152. Qwest did. The bill should be titled The Qwest Monopoly
Protection Act. It is so intentionally convoluted and "requirements"- laden,
with techno- gobbledygook and downright contradictory and vague measures,
that even the Associated Press got the story backward, reporting the bill
would stimulate Internet communications in small towns. Actually, the bill
effectively prohibits local governments, including entire counties, from
serving their own citizens in the absence of the willingness or ability of
the private sector to do so. It's an anti-competition bill masquerading as a
pro-private-sector competition bill - a big legislative lie.



Qwest quietly lobbied SB 152 into existence via the Colorado johnny-come-
lately Denver-centered Democratic Sen. Jennifer Veiga. She got Rep. Cheri
Jahn to sponsor it in the House. Neither of these legislators has a clue
about the future importance of information technologies or the Internet or
its economic implications for Colorado. I'd like to see either of them get
connected, or set up a law practice in Redstone, where a desperate
programmer had to sell his house and move to Glenwood Springs to get access.
Yet Glenwood's City Council itself, years ago, voted for and deployed its
own Internet in frustration at the unwillingness of Qwest to do so. By this
law, it couldn't do it again.



Veiga and Jahn's political philosophy? Much the same as Marie Antoin-
ette's: "Let em eat dial-up cake."



What motivated Qwest to do this? It came from their collusion with all the
other regional telephone companies, who panicked recently after one large
city - Philadelphia - tired of waiting for Verizon to get the Internet to
them by trickle-down economics and started setting up its own municipal
Internet. Now, at least 50 other cities across the country, including
several in Colorado, think this is a very good idea. So do I. And those
telephone companies have rushed to 12 other state legislatures to stop
cities from serving their citizens. Colorado is their latest sucker.



Qwest doesn't care a whit whether the Internet is available across the
state. It certainly doesn't invest in the Internet as a service to the
public - but just for the sake of its bottom line.



In fact, Qwest knows it is incapable of making a profit delivering the
Internet across rural Colorado for the foreseeable future, while small
municipalities can do it, and very cheaply, especially using high-speed
telephone company bypass wireless - the same technology I paid for out of my
own pocket and deployed among the unconnected Nepalese on Mount Everest at
15,000 feet. Sherpa teachers and kids are now better connected from Namche,
Nepal, than businessmen in Creede.



But this is the central political point the dense legislators refuse to
admit: Qwest wants to stop anyone else - especially desperate cities whose
citizens are without the benefits of the information age - from doing it
themselves as public utilities in the public interest.



Municipalities offering Internet as a service is fundamentally no different
from governments building the "information delivery" infrastructure of the
last century - roads and highways and paying for them by tax money. Or from
providing public utilities - power, water, gas, sewer - and charging for
them by monthly billing. Why are not these illegal?



Our lawmakers can't put 2 and 2 together. But I'll bet they sure can count
Qwest's political contributions aimed at keeping its dying corpus alive. Is
that what is meant by the "culture of life"?



SB 152 should be killed. It accomplishes nothing, and retards everything in
Colorado's information future.



Dave Hughes is a resident of Colorado Springs. He is a graduate of the U.S.
Military Academy at West Point and 23-year veteran of the U.S. Army. He is
the owner and founder of Old Colorado City Communications and has been an
advocate of electronic information technology since its earliest years.



Dave Hughes
dave () oldcolo com

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