Michigan Lawmaker Flees Twitter After Reports Highlight She Helped AT&T Push Anti-Competition Broadband Law

from the the-best-laws-money-can-buy dept

Last week we noted how Freshman Michigan Representative Michele Hoitenga has been pushing a broadband competition-killing bill she clearly neither wrote nor understands. The industry-backed bill, HB 5099 (pdf), would ban Michigan towns and cities from using taxpayer funds to build or operate community broadband networks, and would hamstring these communities' abilities to strike public/private partnerships. The bill is just the latest example of broadband industry protectionist laws ISPs ghost write, then shovel unobstructed through the corrupt state legislative process.

ISPs want to have their cake and to eat it too; they don't want to upgrade or deploy broadband into rural or lower income areas, but they don't want others to either. Why? Because these communities might highlight how there's creative, collaborative alternatives to the duopoly status quo we all despise. And they certainly don't want added outside pressure disrupting the good thing (read: duopoly regulatory capture resulting in no competition and higher rates) they've enjoyed for the better part of a generation.

While companies like AT&T could deter towns and cities from looking for creative alternatives by offering better, cheaper service, it's much less expensive to throw money at lawmakers who, with the help of groups like ALEC, craft and pass laws protecting their regional mono/duopolies. All while pretending that their only real motivation is to protect the taxpayer, of course.

And while this process has played out in dozens of states repeatedly over the last fifteen years (more than twenty states have let ISPs write similar state laws), Hoitenga's lack of experience provided a closer look at the often-grotesque process. As we noted last week, Hoitenga doesn't appear to even remotely understand how the broadband industry works, from her belief that Michigan residents had 37 different ISPs to choose from, to her argument that letting giant ISPs dictate what locals can do in their own communities somehow...helps the little guy.

As the press began to politely highlight how Hoitenga should probably actually understand the industry she's legislating and the bill she's supporting, the lawmaker refused to comment -- and instead chose to flee Twitter:

For added protection, she blocked my account specifically from following her whatsoever:

That should certainly fix the problem, right? While it's unclear which giant ISP wrote the bill Hoitenga couldn't bother to understand, AT&T has been particularly active on this front over the last decade and is the most likely culprit. And based on a quick look at campaign financing and lobbying disclosures, Hoitenga's fealty to the status quo appears to have come relatively cheap for the multi-billion dollar media, television and telecom conglomerate:

Campaign finance records reviewed by IBT show that two of her largest campaign contributors are AT&T Michigan and the Telecommunications Association of Michigan (TAM): AT&T gave her campaign $1,500 while TAM provided her with $3,500 — large amounts for a first term state representative. The Michigan Cable Telecommunications Association — a separate entity from TAM — gave Hoitenga’s campaign $1,000.

According to state lobbying records reviewed by IBT, Hoitenga met and dined with TAM lobbyists during the first half of the year. Michigan’s lobbying disclosures are filed every six months, so it is currently unknown if TAM lobbyists has met with Hoitenga since June. The $142.82 spent to take Hoitenga out for a meal appears to be the only food and beverage expense TAM has disclosed in conjunction with its lobbying since 2001 , as far back as online lobbying records go.

Again, why bother to offer better and cheaper broadband service when you can quite literally buy protectionist state law for a few thousand dollars and some duck a l'orange?

Update: While Hoitenga has since restored public access to her Twitter account, I remain blocked. She has subsequently tried to claim on Facebook that the accounts she blocked were issuing threats against her and her family. For the record I asked Hoitenga one, entirely civil question.

Filed Under: competition, michele hoitenga, michigan, muni broadband, press
Companies: twitter

Michigan Lawmaker Doesn't Understand Her Own Bill Hamstringing Broadband Competition

from the best-leadership-money-can-buy dept

For the better part of a decade we've noted how if America really wanted to improve its horrible broadband problem it would stop letting industry giants like Comcast write shitty protectionist state telecom law. Over the last fifteen years, more than twenty states have passed laws preventing towns and cities from building their own broadband networks even when no incumbent broadband provider will. In many instances these bills also hamstring public/private partnerships, which are often the only way to creatively bring better broadband to under-served or unserved areas of the country.

Michigan is the latest to highlight this problem. Freshman Representative Michele Hoitenga this month introduced HB 5099, a bill that would make it difficult if not impossible for local towns and cities to build their own broadband networks. The bill would ban towns and cities from using taxpayer funds to improve local telecom infrastructure. According to the Institute for Local Reliance, an organization that fights these protectionist measures and helps municipalities improve broadband coverage, the bill would also deter towns and cities from striking public/private partnerships with the likes of Google Fiber:

"The exception allows local communities to engage in public-private partnerships, but the bill’s ambiguous language is likely to discourage local communities from pursuing such partnerships...Rather than put themselves at risk of running afoul of the law, prudent community leaders would probably choose to avoid pursuing any publicly owned infrastructure initiatives.

ISPs defend these bills by insisting they're just really concerned about wasting tax dollars (despite historically wasting far more taxpayer money than potentially any other industry in America). Lobbyists and hired telecom policy hacks have spent fifteen years demonizing all municipal broadband projects as boondoggles. In reality, their goal is to protect regional duopolies from anything even closely resembling real broadband competition by ghost writing awful state law. They want their cake and to eat it too: they refuse to offer quality service or upgrade their networks, but they want government to prevent anybody else from doing so either.

In reality, municipal broadband networks are like any other business plan. Some are good, some are bad, and all are highly dependent on the particulars of a region. But it should be up to local voters and the towns and cities themselves to make that determination -- not AT&T and Comcast lobbyists and hired policy flacks sitting half a world away.

As people have grown more frustrated with shitty broadband, bipartisan opposition to these kinds of bills has only grown. After all, disdain for Comcast and its abysmal customer service is one of only a few things that can truly bridge partisan divides. Most people seem to realize we need to get creative to compensate for ISPs that feel fully deploying broadband networks (especially to rural markets and the poor) isn't worth the time and money. As a result, Hoitenga this week began facing some notable blowback on Twitter (you really should read this entire exchange while it still exists) for her proposal.

Hoitenga quickly made it clear she doesn't actually understand the proposal she's supporting. For example, while her bill would take rights away from local voters by hamstringing how they can fund their own local infrastructure, she insisted she was somehow protecting voting rights:

Hoitenga then proceeded to display her profound misunderstanding of the broadband market by insisting municipal broadband networks aren't really necessary, because Michigan voters somehow have access to 37 different competing broadband providers:

How did the lawmaker come to this conclusion? Bing (yes, Bing!) apparently told her so. While most people usually have the choice of only one or two broadband providers that barely compete with each other, the lawmaker posted a screenshot in the bizarre belief she was contradicting this reality:

Of course, if you actually visit the page that she saw in her Bing search, it tells, well, a very very different story. It's useful, first, to scroll to the bottom to look at the actual map of Holland, which shows how many providers are where.

Note that most of Holland has only 2 or 3 providers. Not 37. Again, this is from the very link she claims supports her "37 providers" claim. And, of course, if you look at the details of where that "37" number came from, you'll quickly understand why it's bogus. First, it includes wireless and business-only broadband providers. That's totally unrelated to the residential market. Second, it counts different kinds of broadband from the same company (e.g. "DSL" and "fiber") as a separate provider, despite clearly being the same. Finally, and most importantly (and obviously from the map above) it ignores that the vast majority of these providers cover very, very little of the city of the city -- to the point that they're barely offering service in the city at all. Below are the residential offerings, and if you focus on that "availability" column, you'll note that most of them cover well less than 5% and a bunch are around 1%.

At most you could argue people would likely have a choice of 3 providers in their location. And one of them -- TDS DSL -- is apparently limited to 4mbps which, you know, is not broadband according to the very definition provided by the FCC. And, how can we not mention the "customer ratings" column? The whole point here, and the very reason why so many people are clamoring for competition from municipal broadband, is because they hate their expensive, crappy, limited choices.

The biggest problem here however is that these bills are usually quite literally written by incumbent ISPs, then shoveled through the legislative process via organizations like ALEC. Said ghost-written legislation then stumbles through approval with lawmakers barely understanding what they're pushing, which is something we've seen time and time again. If ISPs are so opposed to municipal broadband, there's an easy way to stop these efforts: offer a better, cheaper product and improve their historically-awful customer service.

But in the United States, it's far easier to ghost write legislation, hand it off to a cash-compromised lawmaker that has no idea what it means, then sit back and enjoy the financial benefits of regulatory capture while America falls farther behind the broadband curve. This really is, as they say, why we can't have nice things.

Filed Under: competition, michele hoitenga, michigan, muni broadband