Two states, Washington and Arkansas, already dramatically scaled back their state restrictions during COVID, leaving seventeen states that still have some kind of pointless restrictions on the books. In this case, that disruption comes in the form of an organic, voter-approved response to widespread market failure that’s left Americans paying an arm and a leg for what’s often spotty, substandard broadband access. If passed, the new proposed legislation (SB-183) – co-sponsored by a bipartisan-ish group of state legislators (10 Democrats and 2 Republicans) – would neuter SB-152 and allow local communities to decide for themselves if they wanted to pursue municipal broadband without needing special permission from the state.ĬOVID lockdowns and the home education and telework bills did a fabulous job highlighting these dumb laws, which effectively exist to shield local monopolies from any sort of disruption. And now state leaders are finally considering eliminating the pointless law entirely via SB183: Whoops.Īs a result, more than 121 Colorado communities have opted out of the restrictions in a bid to improve local broadband access. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contains a provision that lets individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum. This dance of dysfunction has been particularly interesting in Colorado, however. It’s a scenario where ISPs get to have their cake and eat it too they often refuse to upgrade their networks in under-served areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), but also get to write shitty laws preventing these under-served towns from doing anything about it even if such efforts are approved by the majority of voters. Quite often, these industry ghost written laws even ban municipalities from engaging in public/private partnerships. Even in instances and areas where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to upgrade their networks. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks.
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