Month: January 2005

KATC runs a story based on yet another Fiber411 press conference and Lafayette’s quick response team of Durel and Huval.

The latest strange ploy of the anti-fiber petitioners is to ask the council to “put the plan on hold until legal issues are settled.” Comme Ca? Say what? So these guys, based on their wishful-thinking “research,” get way out ahead of themselves and are begining to realize that they’ve collected signatures on a petition that is simply invalid want the council to stop the train while they figure out what they should be doing.

That’s just nuts. In the real world, if you make a mistake of this magnitude, make it in public, and make it in the face of consistently good advice from your opponents, then you admit your error and see if you can fix it. You don’t ask for a time out while you figure out the game.

It might even be nice if they would admit that they were wrong, acknowledge that nearly everyone told them so, and grant that maybe their reflexive distrust of government caused them to ignore good advice from public officials.

I’ll be looking for a press conference like that.

The KATC article: Durel: Fiber 411 Contradicts Themselves (Look for the video.)

Doug Menefee has issued his personal endorsement of Lafayette’s Fiber to the Home initiative. Doug, long a supporter of the project, has projected a low-key public demeanor. This higher profile endorsement is very welcome.

In a broadcast email and in post on his blog, “Open Letter to Residents of Lafayette Parish” Doug rebukes the anti-fiber petitioners for misleading the public about the meaning of the petition and makes clear his support for LUS’ project as a practical necessity.

Doug has recently issued a 7 point “Advocates of a Fiber to the Home network need to be heard” call to action that is also well worth your consideration.

Go Doug!

(I’d love to see more of such personal endorsements! It’s part of what is needed.)

Tempted to believe that malarky that no municipal telecom utility has ever succeeded? Don’t be. Bristol’s telecom, beset by its own incumbents opens a second rollout of services beyond its original Bristol footprint–so says an article in the local paper.

Sounds like failure? Not to me.

This is simply an extension of Bristol’s continuing success as documented in Mike’s Fact Check article: Blowing the Whistle Over Bristol. That’s well worth a short review if you are tempted to believe the misinformation put forward by local petitioners. That story contains the following quote from an earlier article in the Bristol paper:

“A year after it became one of the few public utilities in the country offering full telecommunications services, Bristol Virginia Utilities is beating its business plan and reaching its goals more quickly than expected.”

If anyone wanted to know the truth about Bristol and other municipal success its been available right here at LafayetteProFiber since August. No one should be repeating the lie that telecom utilities never succeed to the people of Lafyette. I’ve directed two of the anti-fiber petitioners to this article (and Billy Ray’s Interview) since this began. Victims of their own rigidity they seemed honestly astounded that the line fed them by the incumbents had ever been challenged and wanted to know of “even one” Example. It’s not even hard.

Do the research.

Sunday’s Baltimore Sun contained an excellent article on the revolution that we are all part of — even if we’re not always aware of it.

The emphasis is on the impact that the digitization of communications tools — from blogs to digital movie cameras to Apple’s GarageBand — is lowering barriers to participation in all form of media and creative arts.

Here’s a couple of paragraphs that give a flavor of the article:

Those who study changes like these – changes that transform societies – believe it may be decades, even a century, before we are able to truly understand the time we are living in and the impact of the changes that the digital revolution is spawning.

“I don’t think we’re capable of grasping the significance,” says [Andrew] Nachison of the Media Center, which studies the intersection of the media, technology and society. “We get caught up in the day-to-day minutiae. It misses the bigger deal that’s going on.”

He doesn’t believe the digital age will make life universally better. The same tools that allow for freer communication and unfettered connection can also be used for less lofty purposes. At the low end of this spectrum, for instance, the ubiquity of camera phones has led some gyms to ban them for fear that members would be photographed in various states of undress in locker rooms. Of greater concern are more fundamental issues, such how to weed fact from fiction in the flood of information now available online.

“Individuals and organizations which seek to distribute disinformation and misinformation have new tools at their disposal,” Nachison says, “and that means everything from corporate disinformation to government propaganda has a new means of distribution.”

Still, Nachison is optimistic about what the digital revolution will mean.

“The empowerment of individuals to share information is ultimately going to be a democratizing force around the world. Or, to put it another way, [it will be] a means of disrupting any institution which attempts to repress or control freedom, whether that is a corporation or a government.”

Check out the entire article. It’s thought provoking says a lot for a newspaper feature.

Correction 1/17/05 11:45. I was wrong–though I missed it on in the print version and online on the date it was originally published–apparently the Advertiser did print more than a single line acknowledging the remarkable endorsement of its chain’s flagship as I discovered during a recent search of their site during an archiving sweep. I’ve corrected the story below; old text is struck through and new text is dark red.

Ok, Let’s get real folks. There come a point when generally lackadaisical local coverage degenerates into something less wholesome. As a loyal reader of LPF you know that Lafayette’s fiber fight has been making national news. Perhaps the most significant event in last week’s recent train of encouraging news (1,2, 3,4) is the endorsement of Lafayette’s position by the nation’s largest circulation newspaper: USAToday.

National endorsement of a small city’s local issue is, my friends, NEWS. It is even more NEWS if part and parcel of that endorsement is an analysis that of one of the nation’s largest megacorps is trying to reassert monopoly power across a range of activities and that its abuse of power in Lafayette is simply the clearest indication of its national intent.

Trust me, this is a BIG DEAL. When was the last time you saw a media outlet condemn a major advertiser (excuse me, I meant corporation) on the grounds of economic misconduct–actually when did we last hear a megacorp condemned for anything in major media outlets? Bhopal? Halliburton? (Halliburton, hmmn, what was that local connection again?) It takes a lot to get today’s media, almost uniformly owned by megacorps to condemn one.

Long windup, I know, but here is the pitch:

What the heck is going on when the Lafayette Daily Advertiser can only manage this one sentence remark buried at the end of a story about the anti-fiber petition:

“Tuesday, USA Today published an editorial supporting Lafayette’s fiber plan and a counter view by BellSouth Louisiana president William Oliver.”

That’s all. The ultimate keep it quiet, non-offensive, he said, she said, enough-so-that-nobody can-say-we-ignored-it non-coverage.

The best the Advertiser can do is a short, he said, she said report clearly designed to be inconspicuous and inoffensive. It is close to the least coverage of a truly signficant story that I can imagine.

This would be more nearly understandable, if no less inexcusable, if they were toeing some corporate line. But, The Advertiser is a Gannett newspaper. USAToday is the chain’s flagship; the crown jewel of the empire. No, the Advertiser could reprint the editorial (and even give a little appropriate background about the rarity of the action and the article that it references) without any fear of blowback from corporate central.



Neither can they claim that posting an “outside” editorial would somehow compromise their distinctively local nature. Recall the obscene little advertorial that they published not all that long ago on the op ed page of the paper Which cheerfully sold all sorts of falsehoods about municipal broadband networks. That author wrote under the colors of one of the nations most notorious right-wing research-for-hire groups, the Heartland Institute; so an editor wary about outside influences might have chosen not to air the product of such a partisan institution. Even more incredible, a quick google of the author’s name pulls up the fact that he owns “Expert Editorial,” a company which produces editorials for hire. Hello? Any Connection? Who paid for this ‘expert editorial?’ Did it occur to anyone that an editorial with such dubious antecedents might be, well, dishonest? And printing it unwise?

However we interpret that affair, it is clear that the editorial staff is not adverse to running outside opinions on this flash-point issue. It is also clear that Gannett headquarters would have no objection. Finally, hell, this is actual NEWS.

Why haven’t we seen better coverage of this important story? The people of Lafayette should be able to read this critical document in their own newspaper. I’d not even mind if the Advertiser felt it necessary to run BellSouth’s (non)rebuttal at its side.

The coverage problem has reached the point of denying the people of Lafayette access to a major story on our situation. That needs to stop.

Count this as yet another affirmation that fiber is, indeed, the infrastructure of the future. The Department of Defense is building a fiber network linking U.S. military bases in Iraq and a number of other Middle East/South Asia countries.

* Fiber To The Bunker

Muniwireless has a worth-reading post on the sorts of ‘think tanks’ that have plauged us here in Lafayette. It specifically takes on the lie that no municipalities have been successful with Municipal Broadband that is sold by various research-for-hire PR businesses disguising themselves in the trappings of academic endeavors.

We’ve had to deal with these sorts here in Lafayette since the early days. This site’s launch was timed to allow us to respond to the “Academic” Broadband Forum. In that forum the members of the panel were faux academicians of this stripe. More recently the Advertiser printed an advertorial written under the colors of the Heartland Institute and whose author owns a business aptly called “Expert Editorials” which repeated many of the same lies about municipal success. A Heartland Institute “research report was recently cited over at fiber411. Part of the problem with this stuff is that it fits right into the wishful thinking of some folks who want to believe things that simply are not true and gives them “cover” making claims that anyone who knows the field knows are simply not true.

I am a recovering academician myself and take personal offense at the way dishonest research devalues the work of people who actually value the truth.

On the more gratifying side of things, the article cites, and qoutes from at length, LafayetteProFiber’s interview with Jim Baller concerning incumbent disinformation campaigns. It’s nice to be appreciated.

The two stories from this morning (Advocate, Advertiser) on the back and forth petition mess project the strange spectacle of the petitioners complaining that they had so messed up their petition drive that they could no longer hope to succeed being countered by the city-parish and LUS saying that they could still run a petition drive if they wanted to, was really pretty astounding when you think about it.

And really there should be a lesson in this for us as the observers of the situation. Whatever virtues the anti-fiber petitioners might have, doing the research is not one of them.

Let’s go through it slowly: first the petition drive sponsors decided to go forward on the basis of the wrong law; likely had they admitted to themselves that this was the wrong law and faced squarely the daunting task of getting 15% of the voters to agree with a specific ordinance requiring LUS to not offer services over the network LUS builds they’d would have know they’d never succeed.

So they did the research. And discovered a happier truth.

Trouble was that it wasn’t true. Reality, finally, intruded.

When that happened the response wasn’t particularly pretty. They called a press conference to complain that, somehow, the city was responsible for their wishful thinking.

But, and this is the strange twist in the tale, the response from the city (albeit reluctantly) was no, they had it wrong again, they could still, if they were willing to abide by the rules that had been open to them all along, go ahead.

But this morning at least one of them was out in a parking lot getting signatures on the old, useless petition. It doesn’t conform to the law and all the signatures to date are simply not valid. What funds such behavior? Wishful thinking. They appear unable to let go of what they believe ought to be true in favor of what is true.

The take home message in all this is that guys are prone to believing what they wish were true and that the “research” they do doesn’t lead them to new conclusions (as real research must) but only confirms what they previously believed. A briefcase or folder full of papers doesn’t constitute research unless the reader was open to being persuaded by the truth. The great weakness in these guy’s positions is that they are not open to being shown they are wrong.

But that weakness is also their greatest strenghth. They are true believers. They are sincere.

They can share that conviction with assurance and say things that just aren’t true with confidence.

But eventually they (and we) will find out that the stories they are telling really aren’t true regardless of the faux research the believe they have done. Wireless will not cure all our bandwidth ills. LUS is not some stalinist boogie man. Fiber is not even beginning to become obsolete. The incumbent monopolists will not play fair if the petitioners hand them a referendum. In modern political/PR campaigns it isn’t truth that wins but bankrolls. That they may sincerely believe these lies does not make them less the lie. Reality will intrude. The danger actually lies in believing them. What is most encouraging about the current debate, the continued delusions of these guys aside, is that, astonishingly, we’ve reached the point where no one is seriously arguing that LUS should not build and maintain a fiber-optic network regardless of incumbent distress. We (and, to give proper credit, they) agree that it must happen sooner rather than later and that LUS should do it. We are down to arguing the details of the business plan and whether it is wise to encourage a train wreck in order to get a plan that agrees with the ideology of a small minority.

There is a reality out there—a political, economic, and technological reality that will not go away just because it is inconvenient for some beliefs. The petitioners would do us all, but most of all themselves, a favor if they’d realize that.

In a letter to the public over at Fiber411 Tim Supple goes over the top in a disjointed and internally inconsistent plaint that he be allowed to walk Lafayette into the brutal mugging that a referendum fight would surely be.

It should be clear to all that in the real world BellSouth and Cox have not restrained themselves to a respectful or truthful argument and that there is no reason to expect that to change. Give them the platform of a referendum, the platform that they have been angling for from day one and everyone in the real world knows that they would take advantage of their huge financial advantage and relative lack of legal restraint to do to Lafayette what the incumbents have done everywhere: flood the media, a significant part of which they own, with as sickening flow of misinformation. (BellSouth’s proposed state law and Cox’s campaign both focused largely on making a referendum happen.)

Their whole purpose would be to defeat LUS in such a way that a public infrastructure could never be built.

Don’t be deceived. If the petitioners were to succeed the consequence would be that they would never get their declared aim: to build a public fiber optic system that conforms to their idea of an ideologically correct business plan.

What follows is a partial rebuttal of the points made. My points are inset in green.

———————

To Lafayette City Parish Government and Citizens of Lafayette:

Who is Fiber411.com? We are citizens asking for the right to vote on the $125,000,000 bond issue proposed by LUS. Nothing more. We are not bad losers, poor sports, Bell South stooges or supporters of a Cox monopoly.

Fiber411.com is a small group of citizens that started with the belief that the present LUS Fiber to the Home Initiative is not the best plan for Lafayette. We are 100% for a fiber optic network in Lafayette. We are for LUS building the infrastructure that the will bring competition to Bell South and Cox. We do not support Bell South, COX or LUS domination of our market.

Prove it: refuse the help of those who do not share either your goals or your values. It is abundantly obvious that support from BellSouth and Cox is support with an intent to kill LUS project. Demand they open their systems. Don’t allow BellSouth or Cox to spend money supporting you. Denounce any use of paid time by “volunteers.”

We are for an open network that will allow the owners of LUS (the citizens) access to the all of the competitive service providers throughout the world. We oppose LUS and/or the City Parish Government being both the competitor and the regulators in the retail market for telephone, Internet and cable TV.

You claim to be for LUS being the builder and owner of the network but want open competition in the retail market. There are two ways to that goal. You can try and wreck the ongoing process in hopes of starting it over –blithely ignoring the reality of incumbent power– or you can say plainly to LUS what you think would be better, prove yourself worth by working hard to get the network in place, and mount a fight for a more open system when outsiders aren’t a factor and the very existence of the network isn’t at risk. A petition at that point could make good sense. If Cox or your ally BellSouth gets the fiber network because of your tantrum your dream will never have any possibility of being realized. Focus on the reality of the situation! If this is indeed what you want then accepting help from the incumbents is allowing them to use you to their ends.

We believe that the present LUS Fiber to the Home Initiative is a bad business plan that requires the citizens of Lafayette to take unnecessary risk

Actually it is you who wants LUS to take the bigger risk. A rental plan where the owner shares the revenue with the service provider 1) makes the owner reliant on the competence of others, 2) will always be a weaker business plan because it means sharing the income that could be yours with folks that don’t have your gumption and haven’t taken the risk to build the infrastructure required. This is precisely why BellSouth and Cox will continue to pursue their strong business plan of gathering all the profit for their owners. Why should LUS tie one hand behind them when the other guy is punching away?

and in the end will result in higher utility rates, increased taxes and limited consumer choice to new technology.

This is merely ideological. You believe it to be true only because of an unreasoning hostility towards government. In the real world what has happened is that LUS following exactly this path has resulted in generally lower utility rates than private regional competitors. It also meant lower taxes since “fees for service ” substitute for otherwise necessary city tax income. And we see no evidence that LUS who has continually rebuilt the electricity plant has shown poor judgment in the new technologies it chose in those realms. LUS has arguably outperformed and inarguably at least equaled the performance of its private competitors in each of these realms. To look at history and see anything else is to be blinded by ideology.

But all of that is a debate for another day in a public forum, which allows facts, ideas and opinions to be presented to the public for their consideration.

No, it is not a “debate for another day.” Arguing the actual issues instead of giving in to the pretense that stopping the plan is not your real purpose is what we should be doing. You don’t want to have a vote because you’d like to “think” about it some more. No, honestly now, you want a vote because you’ve already thought about it and intend to stop the plan. You believe it unwise. This mealy-mouth nonsense doesn’t play well and it makes it look like you are willing to say stuff like this just to avoid dealing with the fact that if the people were to actually vote on the issue right now you’d lose and damn few people would sign your petition. But you apparently hope that with a little initial finessing of the truth about your final aim and the subsequent dollars of outsiders in a referendum you can turn that around. Should this ever come to a vote the issue the incumbents make of it will have nothing to do with “open systems” and everything to do with trying to make people believe it is just too scary for anyone but big brother from Atlanta to do. And that the children of Lafayette should be grateful to wait their turn. That is exactly the tack they took in the first months and there is no reason to think they won’t again. Did you miss all that?

All Fiber411.com is asking for is the right of the citizens to vote on the present LUS plan.

(See above.)

We attended the city council meeting and were only given 3 minutes

This is an outrageous lie. Sorry. But it is. Neal, Bill, talk to this guy. Tell him not to say things that anyone who was there knows is as far from the truth as is conceivable. For the record: Neal and Bill both talked for a very long time; multiple times. And were treated with complete respect by the council. They’ll both confirm that. They just didn’t convince the council. It isn’t that they didn’t make the argument but that they lost it that galls.

to compete with the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by LUS to sell this plan to its citizens and the city council. At these meetings we asked the city council for the right to vote and they refused. If you are one of the council members that told us that you voted for the LUS plan because you had not heard objections from your constituents, we are objecting now.

To this end, we are circulating a petition, which asks the city council to give the citizens of Lafayette the right to express their opinion by referendum. We are getting great response from both those who are in favor of the LUS plan and those who are opposed to the LUS plan. The most often quoted phrase is “Well of course the citizens should have the right to vote”.

Ahem, remember Evelyn?

The statute the government is trying to use,

Hey, wait, “the government” isn’t trying to use anything. YOU are trying to use a law that you were warned was not appropriate. (I know this for a fact. I did some of the warning. Ask Bill. Or read the blog.) Your research was bad. That is not the fault of the city-parish. It is your fault. (In my judgment this isn’t the first poor research; it’s just the first you’ve had to really deal with.)

would require us “to submit the proposal to the Council which shall specify within 30 days the form of petition for circulation”. It would then require that the petitioners gather 18,978 signatures on or before January 24, 2005. In the last election only 42,000 people in Lafayette Parish voted. If that is this government’s idea of “government by the people, for the people and of the people”, then we have much bigger problem than LUS fiber initiative and we can all agree that the city government has defeated the right of the citizens to vote.

Really now, be fair. the rules were in place long before this issue arose. You are losing and want to change the rules in the middle of the game. That’s not how it works. You play the game out. Then, if you still think it unfair, you fix the game. This part does sound like someone is being a poor sport. Of course you don’t mention the real figure you’d have to meet: you’d have to get 15% of the voters. That is all. If the town was angry and ready to overturn the decisions of people they voted in to do just this sort of work getting 15% would be no problem. But, I suspect, you know that speaking plainly would make it visible that you represent a very a small minority whose only hope is to get the big boys in from out of town to scare us all into submission. You may think that harsh. It is; I admit. But in the real world that sort of campaign will be the inevitable result of any election that allows Cox and BellSouth to pour money into defeating LUS. And defeating LUS today will only result in either Cox or BellSouth extending their current monopoly networks. And foreclosing an open system forever.

The city council has the power to call for a vote of the people. We are asking our government: “Do you think we should have the right to vote” and we ask our government to respond. Quoting the statutes you have selected,

I interrupt for a reality check. The city has not, cannot “select” any statue. They have merely pointed out which are the controling parts of the code. YOU chose the wrong one because it called for numbers so small that you might actually succeed. The city did nothing to you. You let a little wishful thinking carry you away and are now lashing out at the city for your mistake. Get over it.

which make it virtually impossible for citizens to file a petition for referendum with its government, is not an answer. It’s up to you. It’s either yes or no.

Again 15% isn’t an impossible number if it were more than a very small minority that wanted to stop this project. If the people were up in arms it would be easy. They are not. Referenda shouldn’t be easy. We have a representative government. We elect people to do this work. When we don’t like what they do we fire them.

To our government we suggest that you trust your citizens. To our fellow citizens we suggest that you trust your instincts.

No, be honest, what you are really suggesting is that we all trust BellSouth and Cox to play fair during a referendum and that we overturn the decisions made by the men we elected to do the job because their decisions don’t suit your ideology. We are being asked to trust that you really want LUS to succeed when your actions say otherwise. It’s reality check time for you all and a opportunity to sit back and look at things as they really are and make a better choice about how to achieve your declared ends. I suggest you use that opportunity. Or permantly forfeit your credibility.

In the meantime, we hope the citizens of Lafayette will support this petition and call your city councilman to express your support for a vote by the citizens.

We here at Lafayette Pro Fiber suggest that you call, write, and visit our representatives to let them know of your support for LUS and our city showing a little self-reliance. We don’t need to wait on the whims of Atlanta. We can do it for ourselves-and do it better and cheaper too.

Tim Supple

Citizen

www.fiber411.com

John St. Julien

Lafayetteprofiber.com

The level of discernible panic in the comments from the members of DULL (Delusional United Luddites of Lafayette) in this story from the Saturday Advocate is matched only by the discernible level of serenity on the part of Mayor-President Joey Durel.

Apparently, someone read the Home Rule Charter to the DULL crowd and panic ensued. It turns out that by ignoring the Charter (the governing law on local petitions for referenda), the DULL crowd has painted itself in a corner. The 15 percent of registered voters needed to get the Consolidated Government Council to call a referendum requires a lot more signatures than the DULL crowd thought. Then there is the process of getting an item placed on the Council agenda.

By the time these guys get around to getting to the Council, LUS will likely have gone to the State Bond Commission to sell the bonds that will be used to finance the fiber to the premises network buildout. At that point, a petition would be formally moot.

There’s an old adage that comes to mind when reading this story:

“Lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

In a blog entry at DULL HQ, the fiber foes — in what must now be considered to be an official tactic — resorted to disinformation again.

Specifically, the blog entry says that opponents of the plan were “only given three minutes” to speak against the plan.

As a person who attended the final public comment meeting of the Consolidated Government Council meeting on this issue, I can say without fear of contradiction, that the council gave opponents of the plan plenty of time to make their case for not proceeding with the project — much to the chagrin of supporters.

Their interpretation of the relative merits and capabilities of fiber and wireless infrastructure was as wrong on that night as their interpretation of the prevailing law has proven this week.

One guesses now that their only option now is to turn to preferred option of their monopolistic, closed-network advocate benefactors at BS (BellSouth) — the lawsuit. I thought free market absolutists were against frivolous lawsuits? Who said irony was dead?! Guess we could blame this on the pernicious influence of their monopolist partners. Proof yet again (as if it was needed!) that momma was right — we should be careful how we choose our friends.

Is ignorance of the law recognized the basis for a legal remedy? We may well find out.