Two senators counter Rep. Sessions’s pro-incumbent bill with a pro-community networking bill: Pete Sessions, former SBC employee whose wife works at the company and who maintains direct ownership of large Bell stock and option holdings, introduced a brief and terribly broad bill that eliminates essentially all forms of municipal ownership and outsourcing of broadband. The bill he wrote is broad enough to shut down future airport Wi-Fi and other projects beloved by private forms.
Daily Archives: June 24, 2005
Broadcast Flag Not in Federal Legislation
Good news for Silicon Valley and consumers: The infamous “Broadcast Flag” — digital restrictions on playback of broadcast video — is still dead, it seems, at least for the moment.
When it looked several days ago as though Hollywood would try to sneak the flag into a big appropriations bill, several alert organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge rallied citizens to the cause — to tell senators that they shouldn’t do this. Apparently, they didn’t slip this into the bill, and that’s cause for celebration.
Evidently, quite a few people contacted their Senators on this matter, which is wonderful. This is a great example of the last minute special interest schemes that go on all the time.
Phone Giants Lobby to Block Town’s Wireless Plans
After years of waiting for a local phone company to roll out high-speed Internet access in this growing lakeside town of about 6,400 people, municipal information-technology director Tony Tull took matters into his own hands. The city last year invited a start-up telecom firm to hang wireless equipment from a water tower and connect the town.
The network now provides high-speed wireless Web access to most of Granbury, and the town is negotiating to buy some of the equipment. But Granbury’s foray into the wireless business has propelled it into a battle between cities and technology companies on one side and big telephone companies on the other.
SBC Communications Inc., the dominant phone company in Texas, and other big phone companies say that cities should not be allowed to subsidize high-speed Internet connections — even in areas where the companies don’t yet offer the service.