Election Day Results for Muni Broadband

[SOURCE: Tales from the Sausage Factory, AUTHOR: Harold Feld]
[Commentary] As part of the off year elections, 32 communities in Iowa voted on referenda on whether to explore having a muni broadband system. 17 of the 32 voted to go forward, with 15 voting not to explore the option. Given that Mediacom and Qwest, the incumbent cable and telco companies spent about $1.4 million to defeat the measures, while proponents of the measure spent only a few thousand dollars, that's pretty good. Muni broadband keeps getting attacked using all the usual big business buzzwords that voters (especially in “red states”) are supposed to be conditioned to respond to like Pavlov dogs. They are told allowing local government to provide broadband services is “socialized Internet” and “wasting tax payer money.” Government can't do something this complicated, and shouldn't try, because it will just get in the way of the uber-efficient private sector which — now that the FCC has deregulated broadband — should be rarin' to deploy cheap ubiquitous broadband everywhere. But voters ain't buyin'. They look around and see that big companies concerned with the bottom line are unlikely to want to deploy in their towns and neighborhoods anytime soon. When this stuff comes up in the legislature, it generally gets shot down. And even where it has passed, legislators may have second thoughts.
http://www.wetmachine.com//item/373