AT&T Forgets They Began The Network Neutrality Debate > Lying Lobbyists.

reply to davidhoffman

Re: Lying Lobbyists.

Part of the problem in Georgia was that many municipalities in our state were greedy in approving cable franchises. I believe the standard franchise fee was 5% of gross revenues from a particular city's subscribers. The cable companies expected the city to fund PEG(Public Access, Educational Access, and Governmental Access) operations out of that money. The cable companies would give up 3, 6 or 9 analog channels to support this. But many municipalities pocketed the franchise fees into the general fund and made the cable companies supply equipment, studio space, and training to operate the equipment for the entire PEG operation. The cable companies strongly resented this. AT&T wanted no part of the PEG requirements as they existed in many cities. They considered it doubling the franchise fee. They also did not like the fact that many of the same politicians who created this double taxation were also the ones who bashed the cable industry the most over the cost of cable service. Many of us had seen the pocketed franchise fees go to all manner of poorly thought out pet projects of politicians. So we agreed to take away the abusive capabilities of the existing cable franchise law in exchange for a vague promise that the free market had dozens of companies ready to jump in to build competitive cable TV networks. There were some small cable companies that took advantage of the new law to provide service. But the big competition has not occurred yet. We are in a quandary here. We are not allowed to easily build municipal fiber optic networks that could provide competition to the cable companies, yet we have been unable to get the main challenger of the law, AT&T, to build out UVerse to any significant portion of people.