“Telecoms fight to curb public competition” —USATODAY

USATODAY has an infromative article available: “Telecoms fight to curb public competition.“
From the text:

Cities and towns from San Francisco to Philadelphia, viewing access to advanced telecommunications as pivotal to prosperity, are aggressively seeking ways to provide high-speed Internet connections, wired or wireless, for citizens and local businesses.

But telephone and cable TV companies have responded by flexing political and financial muscle at the state level, arguing that government has no business getting into their business

That’t the gist; but they give lots of examples and recount arguments for both sides. I do think it worth underlining that it is the states to which the corporations are turning. Rather than fight the battle on a local level, as they are forced to do here in Lafayette, they are getting their kept legislators to simply make sure that no battle is possible.

Again, we should be familiar with this, after all a referendum was BellSouth’s second choice: its first was to simply outlaw local government from offering any competition in any form. The incumbents would much prefer not to give any of us any choice. Only when they failed to pass that law did the incumbents come up with a plan to try and force a referendum—and then they decided they needn’t bother with the procedures that they had agreed to in the compromise law that resulted. The referendum is only a tactic for the incumbents to get what they really want: freedom from competition with LUS.