UPDATE: We have until Friday at Midnight to convince Governor Perdue to veto the bill in North Carolina that would kill community broadband. Time Warner Cable has spent millions on H129—a bill that would preserve its monopoly by stifling competition from community broadband initiatives.
Michael Tiemann, Vice President at Red Hat, has written this letter to Governor Perdue. Now, we need more people to add their voices. Please ask your friends in North Carolina to call Governor Perdue or send her an email and ask her to veto bill H129.
You can help by sharing this link (http://bit.ly/brdbd) or retweeting this message on Twitter.
Dear Rootstriker:
I'm writing to ask you to take a simple step to support competition in broadband—and therefore, Internet freedom—against the corrupting influence of (you guessed it) money.
North Carolina has one of the nation's most impressive community broadband movements. Locally owned, state of the art networks are delivering fast, cheap Internet across the state. Big telecom companies—Time Warner Cable in particular—are not happy with their success. They've spent millions on lobbying state lawmakers. Now, the North Carolina legislature has passed a bill that bans competition from community broadband networks. Under this legislation, local communities would be held hostage to the corporate broadband networks that have given America second-rate networks everywhere.
We need you to contact your North Carolina friends and ask them to contact Governor Bev Perdue (D-NC), and ask her to veto this ridiculous bill. Towns and communities should have the right to build local networks to serve their needs. This bill is akin to letting Barnes & Noble ban the building of public libraries in towns where there’s a company book store. It's that outrageous.
All across America, communities suffer because the FCC has allowed competition in broadband networks to atrophy. The only way we can revive that competition is to empower new competitors—including small towns and communities—to build faster and cheaper networks. Companies like Time Warner Cable should be spending their money building better networks, not buying political influence to protect themselves from competition. Their victory in North Carolina will set a precedent, that none of us, anywhere can afford.
Please ask your North Carolina friends to visit this page to contact Governor Perdue.
You can help us by sending this link to your North Carolina friends: http://www.rootstrikers.org/story/community-broadband/
Tweet this link to get more to do the same: http://bit.ly/brdbd (or retweet it here)
This video by The Institute for Self-Reliance details the advantages of the local community networks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMGdZD9qQxo
This essay of mine from 2005 describes a similar fight in Pennsylvania: http://t.co/WrbXkEd
Here's a link to a podcast of the same article: http://t.co/rJUz6v8
We have only 5 days 1 day to convince the Governor. Please ping your friends today.
Lawrence Lessig
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