Hartford Courant

The telecommunications industry lost and consumers won in a Connecticut Superior Court decision that gives cities and towns the right to use existing utility infrastructure within their borders to create municipal networks that deliver cheap, fast internet service to homes and businesses.

Connecticut moved one step closer to reinstating net neutrality along state lines when Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman cast a tie-breaking vote in the evenly divided Senate. The measure helps preserve an open internet, and enshrines the concept of net neutrality into state statute. “At the beginning of the year, Senate Democrats said we’d fight for a net neutrality bill in Connecticut, and this evening Democrats delivered on that promise,” said State Senator Terry Gerratana (D-New Britain).

The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut has released its legislative priorities for 2018 and securing state-level net neutrality rules is at the top of the list.  "If the Federal Communications Commission has its way, big telecommunications companies could slow down access to lawful websites they disagree with or charge more money for faster internet access,’’ the ACLU of Connecticut stated in a fact sheet outlining its legislative agenda.

[Commentary] We are the four librarians who fought a government gag order a decade ago when FBI agents demanded library records under the Patriot Act and told us, under penalty of criminal prosecution, that we couldn't talk about it. We members of what the media called "the Connecticut Four" haven't reunited in the civil liberties cause. Until now.

Attempts are being made in the US Senate to expand the amount and kinds of information that the government may compel libraries and others to divulge. This could once again infringe on the civil liberties of library patrons and silence librarians as we were silenced a dozen years ago. This past summer, the Senate barely defeated legislation that would have expanded the FBI's authority to collect information by using National Security Letters that could gag librarians and others without a court order. The legislation was attached as an amendment to a Justice Department spending bill. The senators could try again any time — including tacking the legislation onto the government funding bill that has to pass this week to avoid a shutdown.

[Peter Chase is retired from the Plainville (CT) Public Library. Barbara Bailey is director of the Welles-Turner Memorial Library in Glastonbury (CT). Jan Nocek is director of the Portland (CT) Public Library. George Christian is executive director of the Library Connection, a nonprofit cooperative of 30 libraries.]