Obama, internet nanny

[Capt._Ron]

Its obvious you have no idea how cable and phone companies operate so let me explain it to you. A cable company makes a contract with the county/city government to provide cable service for X number of years. No other cable provider is allowed to operate in this area until the contract expires. This is called a "franchise".

The cable system works on a franchise because the gear to run cable to each home is hellaciously expensive. Since the cable provider puts up the cash to set up and maintain the cable system they want to protect their investment from competition. Likewise, the cities don't want scads of cables and gear all over the place so it benefits them to have a single provider.

The phone lines work pretty much the same way. A landline phone company (Bellsouth, AT&T, Verizon Landline, etc) is granted a monopoly to operate in a certain area.

The system works the same way for utilities. If you don't like your service with GA Power, you can't just up and switch to Greystone. GA Power owns the grid that supplies power to your home. If you don't like them becuse they aren't giving you the service you want... tough shit you're stuck with them.

So as a consumer you are limited to one cable provider and one phone provider. There are other options like satellite ISP (Hughesnet, etc), but its in its early stages and the technology just isn't there yet. You are limited in your choices of ISP's. As far as ISP's losing business because of them censoring too much material... when they've got the market cornered with a monopoly people really don't have much of a choice but to buy their product or do without.

As far as InfoWars or WND the less you know about those shithole sites the better.

Ok, good deal....I knew how cable worked but I didn't know that the contract with a municipality was considered a franchise. Thank you for the explanation. That being said, I think internet is a different story than cable. First of all you touched on satellite internet as an alternative, but there is also all of the phone companies (T-mobile, sprint, verizon, att) who don't need a contract with a city to provide internet and only need pockets of land (for towers and the like) for their infrastructure. Cable is not the future of internet and I think the competition is there for internet service. The government stepping in will only muddle and decrease that competitiion.

As far as taking up arms again the government....no need...2012 will be here soon enough. I don't think anyone can make the case that Obama has done a "good job" as president and that will show in the next election. What he has done is give a voice the conservatives who would normally be sitting at home while the "young liberals" protested, and this is a good thing.