In this era of bureaucratic overreach and unsustainable spending and deficits, should government also enter the business of competing against private communications service providers?\u00a0 Doesn’t it already have its hands full?<\/p>\n
We at CFIF think so.\u00a0 In fact, we testified last month before the North Carolina legislature<\/a> on behalf of thousands of supporters and activists across that great state in support of H.B. 129, which would restrain government bureaucrats from unfairly competing against private providers of communications services.\u00a0\u00a0 And with good reason.\u00a0 From Taiwan to Australia, from Chicago to Houston, and inside North Carolina itself, the history of public broadband is without exception one of failure.\u00a0 Every single public broadband project of which we’re aware has failed to so much as break even.\u00a0 Ultimately, taxpayer bailouts become necessary as government endeavors lose money and require constant upgrades to keep pace with evolving technology.\u00a0 Moreover, government broadband boondoggles undermine the billions of dollars invested in private network improvement and expansion, and discourage future private investment.\u00a0 After all, why risk one’s capital to compete against governments that can manipulate the rules and go to taxpayers for bailout?\u00a0 Inevitably, poorer service and layoffs in the vibrant tech sector result.\u00a0 Rural communities particularly suffer.<\/p>\n But none of that logic seems to matter to Democratic FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. \u00a0 In a statement Monday<\/a>, Clyburn attacked the North Carolina’s sensible legislation and defended the concept of government entering yet another portion of the private sector.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering Clyburn’s vote last December to impose so-called “Net Neutrality” in the face of two-to-one public opposition<\/a>, a unanimous Court of Appeals decision<\/a> that the FCC didn’t possess such authority and condemnation from bipartisan groups<\/a> in Congress.<\/p>\n Predictable or not, however, it is critical that Americans at the federal, state and local level vocally oppose the sort of government tech sector overreach that she advocates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In this era of bureaucratic overreach and unsustainable spending and deficits, should government also enter the business of competing against private communications service providers?\u00a0 Doesn’t it already have its hands full? We at CFIF think so.\u00a0 In fact, we testified last month before the North Carolina legislature on behalf of thousands of supporters and activists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[602,70,2565,81,59,562,19,188,102,2568,2567,24,61,179,2566],"class_list":["post-9142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-big-government","tag-budget","tag-communications","tag-debt","tag-deficit","tag-economics","tag-economy","tag-fcc","tag-free-market","tag-hb-129","tag-north-carolina","tag-obama","tag-spending","tag-stimulus","tag-telecommunications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9142"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9169,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142\/revisions\/9169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}