Politicians Defer To Time Warner Lobbyists Who Wrote The Bill They're Pushing

from the funny-how-that-works... dept

Following up on the earlier story of Time Warner Cable going the political route to try to block municipal competition in Wilson, North Carolina, Broadband Reports has a story pointing out two interesting side stories:

1. During hearings about the law to ban such municipal competition, the politicians pushing the bill that would ban municipal competition were asked to clarify, and rather than answer themselves, the politicians "turned to a Time Warner staff member and an attorney who represents the industry to speak on their behalf." In other words, they outright admitted they didn't understand their own legislation and that the corporate lawyers from the company that would benefit from the legislation understood it better than they did. It's certainly no surprise that lobbyists write the legislation that politicians pass, but usually they at least try to hide it a little bit. Here they're basically flaunting the fact that Time Warner Cable wrote the bill, and the politicians just shuffled it through the process without understanding it. Isn't it great to be a servant of the people?
2. Time Warner Cable is complaining about what a huge cost municipal broadband is to the people of Wilson, but leaves out the fact that Time Warner Cable's CEO's compensation from the past two years is greater than it cost the city of Wilson (via a bond measure, so not taxpayer dollars) to fund the deployment of the fiber network. And you have to wonder if Time Warner Cable will end up spending more trying to block this competition than it would have cost to have built out a competitive quality service as well.

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