Feckless thug alert: Time Warner Cable’s lavish plan to stop city-run Internet in Maine

This one from The Daily Dot could make you lose your lunch…

Time Warner Cable recently hosted a ‘Winter Policy Conference’ in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, for local lawmakers. The company paid for the hotels and meals of those in attendance, who were served steak dinners and stayed in rooms that retail for up to $355 per night. According to Rep. Mark Dion, a Democrat who attended the conference, this is how politics in Augusta works. Scott Pryzwansky, the company’s eastern regional PR director, said that the event was designed to help policymakers and others understand the complex telecommunications issues confronting Maine and the nation. The conference comes as municipal broadband movements are springing up across the country, posing an existential threat to ISPs like Time Warner Cable.

At one of the TWC conference’s seminars, company officials presented the results of a deliberately skewed poll:

The answers in the poll’s broadband section made it appear that a majority of the state’s taxpayers do not want to use public funds to support broadband expansion or to “subsidize public entities to compete with private businesses.”

A new poll has revealed that the majority of Americans are in favor of government-funded broadband networks in areas where no broadband service currently exists. Rep. Sarah Gideon, a Maine Democrat, has commented on the poll, saying, “Nobody’s going to say ‘Yes, I want my state to incur debt.” 

Despite this, it appears that the trend of municipal broadband networks is set to increase in the Pine Tree State, with Rockport becoming the first Maine community to launch a 1.2-mile fiber connection in August 2014. This connection is available to anyone in Rockport, and is providing gigabit Internet to Maine Media College.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *