Amended Substitute SB 117: The bottom line
Okay, notwithstanding my big fat “whoops” this morning, here’s my bottom line on the version of Senate Bill 117 that cleared the House Public Utilities Committee yesterday and will be voted on by the whole Ohio House tomorrow: It’s extremely bad news. Your State Representative should vote against it. You should tell your State Representative to vote against it.
All the amending is over with. The Public Utilities Committee had the chance to adopt amendments to make Am Sub SB 117 much less damaging, unfair and anti-community. With the exception of tweaking the public/education/government access provisions, and adding modestly to the Commerce Department’s oversight powers (which started off at zero), the Committee decided not to adopt meaningful versions of these amendments. So the resulting bill still…
- Strips all Ohio communities of their historic franchising and oversight powers over monopoly cable providers, even though most communities will get little or no new video competition or broadband access in return;
- Gives incumbent cable providers a license to abandon neighborhoods — a license that Time Warner, for one, has made clear that it truly wants — at the end of their current franchises, which means immediately for Cleveland, Dayton and other cities whose franchises have already expired;
- Guarantees new fiber-enhanced broadband video access (”cable competition”) to only half the households in AT&T’s phone service territory, and to none of the households in the territories of Verizon, Embarq, Cincinnati Bell, Windstream and other local exchange carriers.
This bill could have been better. But it isn’t better, because the strange alliance of special interests pushing it — AT&T, the state’s cable companies and (I’m sorry to say) the Communications Workers of America — would not allow our Representatives, Republican or Democrat, to make it better. They had veto power, and they used it.
For the same reason, this awful bill will pass the House overwhelmingly tomorrow. If you know any State Representatives who have the brains and backbone to vote against it, remember to raise some money for them in the next election — they’re going to need it.
This is all about the money.