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As of yesterday, Senate Bill 152, which would limit the ability of municipal governments to offer telecommunications services, was on the verge of being approved by both houses of our legislature and going to the governor's desk.
I hope he vetoes it. There are some good reasons why Colorado municipalities might avoid this line of business, but they should make the decision, not the legislature.
The bill prohibits local governments from providing
cable television service, telecommunications service, and
high-speed Internet access
unless there are public
hearings and an election. No such service could be
subsidized.
Colorado municipalities vary in the services they provide. When I lived in Kremmling, the town picked up my trash. In Salida, the job is done by private enterprise. Our electricity comes from a private company that has changed names more times than most banks, but I still think of it as Public Service Co. of Colorado. But people in more socialist-minded venues, like Colorado Springs, get their electricity from the city.
Center, in the San Luis Valley, ran its own cable company until last summer. The town got out of the business because its system needed an upgrade from analogue to digital, which would cost more than the town could pay, and because there are now small satellite-dish services, which weren't available years ago when the town built the system.
This demonstrates two factors that belie arguments made against such municipal services. It shows that a town can run a cable TV system, as Center did for years, and it shows that a town can exit the business when technology changes.
SB-152 isn't really about cable TV, though. Its real
goal is to prevent local governments from installing
publicly accessible wireless access to the Internet,
generally through a method known as WiFi, which stands for
WIreless FIdelity.
Ever since Philadelphia proposed
blanket coverage at municipal expense last year, corporate
lobbyists have been working overtime all over the country
to make sure this doesn't happen anywhere else.
Why might a municipality want to do this? As an
economic development
tool, it might work as well in
improving tourism and business in general as, say, a tax
abatement for some big-box discount store that pays low
wages. If a municipal government feels compelled to spend
money to attract business, why not spend it on something
that benefits current residents, too?
A city might want blanket WiFi for general governmental services; it's easy to imagine how this could benefit police, fire and public-works crews. And if it's there anyway, why not let the public use it, too? If they plow the road so that the fire truck can get through after a blizzard, aren't we allowed to use the road, too?
There are also good reasons to be suspicious of governmental WiFi services. For one thing, there's a good legal argument that if your emailing and web-surfing goes through a municipal system, then the local police could examine those records at any time for any reason, without the bother of a warrant or subpoena.
Another potential problem appears in Texas, where there's a bill that would require Internet filtering on any state-provided wireless access on public property. There is quite a bit of such access, because last year, the Texas Department of Transportation began offering WiFi at highway rest stops. It's easy to imagine a similar law coming about in Colorado if there were municipal WiFi systems, and we do have legislators who would like us to join China and North Korea in censoring the Internet.
Municipal WiFi may also become unnecessary in the near future. Salida is pretty much a telecommunications backwater (we had neither cable Internet nor DSL until early 2004), and yet I can connect to four different wireless access points from my home-office.
None of those signals is my own, for I haven't enabled the wireless on my DSL modem-router. Some local merchants and the library offer free WiFi, as do motels along the highway. You may never be more than a couple of blocks from WiFi here, and one of my daughters in Oregon told me that she hasn't bothered to get her own high-speed access in Bend, because she has so many generous neighbors whose service she can use.
So there are good reasons for municipalities to stay out of the WiFi business. But it's a decision that our local governments are perfectly capable of making, just as they do with electricity and trash, without further interference from the state government.
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