Last week North Carolina lawmakers finally passed a law that companies like CenturyLink and Time Warner Cable have been trying to pass for four consecutive years. Originally the companies had hoped to have municipal broadband projects in the state, like Wilson's fiber to the home service Greenlight, banned completely. Ultimately however, the companies last week had to settle for a law that didn't ban such projects, but did saddle them with additional bureaucratic obstacles while constricting how and where they can grow under the pretense of support for a "level playing field."

Your Representative’s support of the bill showed courage and conviction. -CenturyLink

This "level playing field" bill layers city approval processes with additional bloated public debates and hearings, events which over the last decades we've watched incumbent ISPs with limitless PR budgets use to scare uninformed voters into opposing the measures. The bill also included an amendment that lowered the definition of broadband so that broadband coverage and competitive gaps would be less noticeable.

Reports by the NTIA have ranked North Carolina thirty-seventh in broadband penetration, and many markets are served by just one or two uncompetitive carriers, happy to slowly nurse last-generation broadband networks. These failures are very real, very much un-addressed, and they're the reason these cities have often taken it upon themselves to improve their broadband fortunes.

Many communities like Wilson and Salisbury decided they'd wire themselves with next-gen fiber to the home service, something ISPs like CenturyLink, who'll be nursing copper-based DSL for another decade, wanted to ban or constrict for obvious reasons. The law sped through the North Carolina legislature, and at the very end Governor Bev Perdue had the option to veto the bill -- but lacked the conviction to put a bullet in a law literally written by the very ISPs that have failed to bring next-gen broadband to North Carolina.

With the battle over and under-served North Carolina communities losing, a CenturyLink insider writes us to note the company this week sent employees an e-mail urging them to send their representatives a thank you letter for doing what Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink lobbyists told them to. "We encourage you to send an e-mail to your Representative, thanking him or her for supporting the bill," says the e-mail to employees. "Opponents of the legislation, including the NC Municipal League and other groups, lobbied fiercely against the bill. So, your Representative’s support of the bill showed courage and conviction," the letter insists. The e-mail included this recommended form letter:As you might expect, the e-mail glosses over the fact that state lawmakers passed the bill because they were paid to -- by companies that spent four years and millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions on the issue. It also failed to mention the bar for defining broadband was lowered to ensure that getting an accurate read on who is under-served is made more difficult moving forward. By "other groups," we assume CenturyLink means the consumer advocates, a long list of private companies, academics like Larry Lessig and local communities filled with members of both political parties, all of whom simply wanted to improve dated and inadequate regional broadband infrastructure.