A few months ago Verizon sponsored a bill in Pennsylvania to outlaw municipal wireless networks. It was a bad bill (a) because it contained all kinds of sweetheart deals for entrenched corporations, most notably Verizon and (b) it was profoundly antidemocratic, in that wireless networks are increasingly central to political discourse in this country.
Harold Feld, of the Media Access Project writes a series about media and democracy called "Tales of the Sausage Factory." His close analysis of the PA bill was a key motivator to the resistance to the bill, which caught the perpetrators a little off guard.
Thanks to a mini-firestorm of citizen protest generated by blog land (several other bloggers wrote their own analyses), some of the very worst aspects of this bill were toned down before it was, alas, signed into law.
Now Harold is back with another Tale of the Sausage Factory about a new, and much worse, corporate-sponsored anti-democratic bill to outlaw municipal wireless in Indiana.
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