Bloggers are almost uniformly against a bill to limit municipal Internet services.
A House bill that passed a committee yesterday would put restrictions on local governments that tried to start a broadband Internet utility.
Greensboro blogger Ed Cone writes that he's proud of his hometown for taking a stance against the bill, even if it long ago missed the chance "to distinguish ourselves nationally" with local services.
I'm delighted to see that the City of Greensboro regards public access to the internets as a big deal.
On Yesh.com, Chapel Hill blogger Brian Russell said his first time inside the General Assembly was "an eye opening experience."
I was there to oppose The Local Government Fair Competition Act. Man this bill is anything but fair for local governments and its citizens!
More after the jump.
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At Greenespace, Chapel Hill blogger and (town council member) Sally Greene asks "When is a public utility not a public utility?"
According to the telecommunications and cable industries: when it's the internet.
She also posts extensive notes from the pro and con speeches in the committee.
On Free Utopia, municipal broadband advocate Jesse Harris goes after supporters of the restrictions, including a recent opinion column by John Hood in the Carolina Journal:
Unsurprisingly, Time Warner Cable is the chief backer of the bill. It should also come as no surprise that a talking head from a think tank (in this case, John Hood from the John Locke Foundation) is using partial quotes and half-truths to back up the opposition.
On Red Clay Citizen, Max Borders argues that government shouldn't be in "the business of, well, doing business." The bill would keep the marketplace open, he says:
It's one thing for the government to conduct business, it's quite another for it to create its own monopoly through legislative fiat.
And finally, reporter Mark Binker notes on Capital Beat that tensions are high:
Every once in a while, you'll talk with folks on either side of a story and they'll be talking past one another. This was one of those. It was sort of like I was talking to two different groups of folks about entirely different bills.
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