GigaFight: The TriCities revisited

You've seen mention of the TriCities battle from our Mayor, the Advertiser and on these pages. Annie Collins and her fellow pro-fiber partisans in Illinois were badly outgunned in a finally losing battle against Cableco Comcast and their regional phone company, SBC. The incumbents fought a campaign of disinformation there that attracted national attention and has been closely studied by those considering a fiber-optic network in Lafayette. The experience of the TriCities was in no small part behind our city's reluctance to to go to a referendum.

In the upcoming issue of Mother Jones magazine, the Tri-Cities case gets its fullest review yet. And seeing the story, "GigaFight" all in one place is harrowing indeed. A few points pulled from the text:

The idea had support from unlikely quarters, such as the Batavia Chamber of Commerce, whose members included Comcast and SBC. “Typically, chambers of commerce would not favor governments getting involved in an enterprise that could be handled by private industry,” says Roger Breisch, the chamber’s executive director. “In this particular case, members needed high-speed access, and it simply wasn’t available,” so the chamber supported the plan. The only hurdle was to hold a referendum, required by Illinois law. Then “all hell broke loose,” says Geneva’s Mayor Kevin Burns. “Fear and trepidation were delivered en masse” by SBC and Comcast.

Campaign signs appeared. Postcards, door hangers, and direct mail proliferated, exhorting citizens to reject the “Broadband ‘Property Tax Increase’ Referenda.” At the train station, smiling corporate representatives handed out spill-proof mugs of hot coffee emblazoned with the Comcast logo. Comcast mailed tens of thousands of custom-printed greeting cards pledging the company’s dedication to the community and ran prime-time advertisements (an efficient tactic if you control the local TV network) tarring municipal broadband as a taxpayer crapshoot. SBC billboard trucks trolled among the Victorians. Retired SBC employees and “concerned locals” were bused in from Chicago to knock on doors and persuade residents that SBC jobs and pensions were at stake in the referendum. Marching in lockstep against the Tri-Cities plan, the two otherwise competitive companies flooded the local newspapers with ad dollars, buying up as much as four pages a day. Nearly every household got the same push poll that Mike Simon answered, spreading fears that the Tri-Cities government could check users’ email and that school budgets might be cut to pay for the system. Some pollsters told residents that the city itself had sponsored their poll...

The companies’ main claim was that municipal broadband was a dangerous gamble. According to SBC, this argument was based in part on the work of the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank that produces position papers on issues that affect deep-pocketed companies. (Heartland alleges, for example, that the “campaign against smoking is based on junk science.”) On the subject of municipal broadband, the institute held that “most operate at a loss,” but Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, admitted in an interview that he never studied enough cases to show this was true. Temple University academics, in contrast, who recently completed a broad-based study, contend that it’s too early to tell how well the systems will fare financially. And for many municipalities, profits are moot; they see the service as infrastructure no different from streetlights or sewer lines.

There's a lot more; the story doesn't much lend itself to the sorts of summary excerpts I tend to do here. Go take a look for yourself, I've posted a preview copy to our sight: GigaFight.