Originally posted by: spidey07
After reading the bills, they do have a VERY good point. Read the bills and still tell me that they're wrong. All the law is trying to do is make sure the city has to pay the same fees as private providers. The FCC would most likely agree with these laws.
Why should the city not be allowed to have access to grants for broadband expansion and broadband stimulus? Who could possibly agree with this?
The private industry is subject to none of the rules in either of these bills, so why should the bills pass? Time Warner is not trying to level the playing field, they're trying to tilt it in their favor.
Something tells me you either didn't read the bills or you misread them. Here is SB1004 (the house bill is the same)
http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Se...Senate/PDF/S1004v0.pdf
1) They have to comply with local, state, and federal laws/regulations. Sounds good
2) Establish a separate enterprise fund for accounting of revenues, expenses, etc. WTF? This is an entirely new level of overhead that should be done by the municipal service running this thing. Adding a separate entity to do the accounting is a waste, and if private enterprises were subject to this then they'd shut down.
3) They can't subsidize the cost of communications service with funds from other communications services or revenue sources. This is poorly worded. This requires the service to run at profit, which makes no sense for a government entity. The point is not to generate revenue, it's to provide a service that Time Warner is unwilling to provide! If your "this is retarded" sense is not going off already, then you should go get checked out by a doctor.
4) Rules for determining costs and allowable rates, and none of them need to be in this bill. For some reason it requires that they artificially inflate their costs by accounting for property taxes that would be paid if it were a commercial business (but are not paid because they're public). This is becoming stupid. This artificially increases rates that must be charged (see point 3) by including costs that don't actually exist
5) Prepare and publish an independent annual audit to account for all of these costs, including more fake costs that are artificially created (ie money is never spent on them) so that it looks like they're spending more money than they actually are.
Exemptions - cities can do this for government buildings or if less than 80% of households have any broadband access (ie faster than dialup), but then you can only provide service to the households that have no access already. In other words, this entire bill is a noncompetition agreement.
Private businesses are only subject to point 1, ie they have to follow the law. If you burdened TW with all of these laws, it's likely that they'd have to operate at a loss or else increase rates substantially.
In other words, they're trying to prevent this public service from operating at a profit with lower rates. For NO REASON other than their own greed. They refuse to provide better service, but they also don't want anyone else providing those services.