This earlier post noted that the brewing controversy in Dallas over the Wright Amendment provides a ripe field for politicians to reap financial windfalls so long as they are willing to make bad policy decisions that favor certain private business interests.
It appears that their is an inexhaustible supply of issues in which politicians can parley the sale of their political soul into a nice financial return for their campaign war chests. This Wall Street Journal ($) article reports that telecom companies are lobbying elected officials around the country to rationalize support for legislation that restricts free or inexpensive WiFi service for their constituents:
Dozens of cities and towns across the country are rushing to provide low- or no-cost wireless Internet access to their residents, but the large phone and cable companies, fearful of losing a lucrative market, are fighting back by pushing states to pass legislation that could make it illegal for municipalities to offer the service.
Philadelphia announced during the summer that it would hook up the entire city with Wi-Fi. Its current Wi-Fi service is free, but it hasn’t decided whether that would continue with wider deployment; it may charge a small fee. “There are some very specific goals that the city has that are not met by the private sector: affordable, universal access and the digital divide,” says Dianah Neff, the city’s chief information officer. She says that less than 60% of the city’s neighborhoods have broadband access.
However, last week, after intensive lobbying by Verizon Communications Inc., the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a bill with a deeply buried provision that would make it illegal for any “political subdivision” to provide to the public “for any compensation any telecommunications services, including advanced and broadband services within the service territory of a local exchange telecommunications company operating under a network-modernization plan.” Verizon is the local exchange telecommunications company for most of Pennsylvania, and it is planning to modernize the region using high-speed fiber-optic cable. The bill has 10 days for the governor to sign it or veto it.
The Pennsylvania bill follows similar legislative efforts earlier this year by telephone companies in Utah, Louisiana and Florida to prevent municipalities from offering telecommunications services, which could include fiber and Wi-Fi.
Rather than encouraging municipalities to provide free or inexpensive broadband internet access for its citizens, telecom companies argue that legislators should be more concerned with protecting the telecom companies from competing with local governments to provide WiFi service. Even such palpably superficial reasoning is resonating with Pennsylvania legislators, who apparently need to replenish their campaign war chests:
The Pennsylvania bill, first introduced in 2003, was passed by the state Senate late Thursday night and then passed for a second time by the state House of Representatives late Friday night by wide margins. Senate supporters agreed with Verizon’s view of the legislation. Don Houser, a spokesman for Senator Jake Corman, the Senate sponsor of the bill, said “the thinking was the telephone companies didn’t want to have local municipalities using tax dollars to compete with private dollars.”
Well, citizens are perfectly capable of replacing their elected officials if they do not want their local municipalities competing with private business in providing WiFi service. Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell has until November 30 to act on this legislation and has not yet declared which route he will choose. It’s not a close cal that he should reject the legislation, but money talks in politics and the telecome companies are willing to throw it around. Keep an eye on this one.
By the way, have you noticed that elected officials do not seem to mind having government compete with private financiers in connection with providing governmental financing for a new stadium?