Indiana may join the growing list of states banning towns and cities from building their own broadband networks - at the request of powerful telco and cable lobbyists. Indiana House Bill number 1148 is jam packed with provisions ensuring community efforts to improve themselves will die slow and painful legal deaths.

Esme Vos over at Muni-Wireless calls it the "Keep Indiana on dial-up" bill. As she notes, towns like Scottsburg, Indiana approached Verizon about bringing broadband to their neighborhood, and were told such plans weren't financial viable.

Since nobody else would, Scottsburg decided to wire themselves with broadband.

At a cost of $385,000, the community piggybacked on a local power utility's fiber, deploying a wireless network for the town's 6,000 residents. According to Scottsburg's Mayor, the move ultimately saved the town $6000 per month in telecommunications costs, and a number of local jobs.

"I am one of the medical transcriptionists in Scottsburg and I absolutely LOVE this system, without it I would have had to either relocate or quit my job and I doubt it would have been the latter," notes one of several local residents praising the system at the end of Esme's article.

Then there's Auburn Indiana, who Verizon also refused to serve. One of the town's major employers was preparing to move 75 programmers out of town due to feeble telecom infrastructure. The city unveiled a plan to run its own fiber, in turn tapping into Sprint's cross-country fiber-optic lines.

The jobs stayed.

Enter the bells and cable companies. They don't want to serve towns like Scottsburg or Auburn, but don't want them serving themselves either - just in case they someday become a competitive threat. Fifteen states now have some kind of law on the books banning municipal operations, and dozens more are in the works.

Supporters of HB 1148 will argue it's not an outright ban, but as media activist Sascha Meinrath points out, it's cleverly designed to keep any community planning such networks in legal limbo indefinitely.