ALEC Legislators Manipulating the Market for ALEC Corporations

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This is important for you to know.

I am going to rinse and repeat during this one – cause the rinse and repeat is important.

This article is important!!!

Susan Crawford: Let cities build better Internet access networks

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3 hours ago  •  SUSAN CRAWFORD | Bloomberg View columnist and law professor

Last month, a majority of the Georgia House of Representatives voted against a proposal that would have barred cities from investing in their own Internet access networks. The bill failed because Georgia municipalities, businesses and minority advocates want Internet access that’s faster and less expensive than what commercial providers now offer them.

This is a turning point in what has been a multiyear, state-by-state effort by major commercial Internet access providers — AT&T Inc., Time Warner Cable Inc. and CenturyLink Inc., banded together within the American Legislative Exchange Council — to erect state barriers to competition from local public/private partnerships. Nineteen states have such laws in place.

ALEC legislators manipulating the market using “model legislation” written by corporations and given to ALEC legislators at ALEC meetings to implement back in their state.

SNIP

In Georgia, half the legislators sponsoring the anti-municipal networks bill were council members who had received “scholarships” to attend ALEC meetings, workshops and parties.

So ALEC legislators can manipulate the market using “model legislation” written by corporations and given to ALEC legislators at ALEC meetings to implement back in their state.

Ending these state laws would take just three words from Congress: “including public entities.” Adding that phrase to the Telecommunications Act would clarify that the “entities” that cannot be interfered with by states include cities. Bills along these lines were proposed in 2005 and 2007 but failed to pass.

Good Luck!

Because ALEC ALUMNI in Congress have favors they have to pay beck to the ALEC corporations that paid for their scholarships while they were ALEC state legislators.

SNIP

Right now, the corporate members of ALEC in the communications business are enjoying a quiet life. Their companies are, for the most part, subject to neither competition nor substantial oversight, and they are under no pressure to build fiber-to-the-home networks. Mayors, for their part, are eager to act but uncertain that their states will allow it.

Because ALEC legislators manipulate the market using “model legislation” written by corporations and given to ALEC legislators at ALEC meetings to implement back in their state.

American Legislative Exchange Council legislators — erecting state legislative barriers to competition — through the use of "model legislation" written by corporations and enacted on behalf of corporations by ALEC state legislators.!

Susan P. Crawford, a contributor to Bloomberg View and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, is the author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.” This column was provided via Bloomberg News.

AND HOPEFULLY

The next commissioner of the FCC.