Tue 4 Sep 2007
Make Your Voice Heard: Committee to Discuss UTOPIA Thursday!
Posted by Jesse under Events, Legislation
The Government Competition and Privatization Subcommittee will be holding a meeting Thursday at 9AM to discuss municipal broadband. It will be held in room W125 in the House building. If you're able to, please show up to that meeting and make your voices heard! There's likely to be a lot of misinformation as Steven Titch from the Heartland Institute will be the first presenter (he's the one who wrote the report blasting iProvo) and representatives from Qwest and Comcast will both be on hand.
Let's make sure we don't have any restrictions like SB66 take hold again. Qwest in particular needs to be kept in check since they got in on the feeding frenzy and public fleecing under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. If you're there, give me a shout out to say hi.
September 5th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Folks in Utah should watch out for Titch and be forthright in exposing his history to the senators (the private industry members (!) may well understand his commitments better).
It is not too harsh to say that Titch is a paid shill for the Telecommunications industry. Titch advertises his willingness to sell his judgments on the internet. He has long run a business, Expert Editorials, that offers to take payment from and in return provide a string of editorials written by purported experts that promote their interests. In the words originally found on the website:
Free translation: we’ll say whatever supportive thing you want us to say and you don’t have to get your own hands dirty by lying directly to your public.
And Titch does get “expert editorials” placed in local newspapers. They are reliably against local communities providing telecommunications services for themselves and reliably misleading and untruthful. During the referendum fight that lead to the citizens of Lafayette, Louisiana voting for a FTTH telecom utility Titch had three “expert editorials” placed in the city’s daily newspaper. They substituted ideology for reason. Stephen Colbert might have invented the term “truthiness” to describe Steven Titch. (For anyone who’d like to review that history it is available at LPF-1, 2, 3)
Titch’s affiliation with the Heartland Institute as a “fellow” confirms that actual expertise is now what it’s all about. The Heartland Institute endorses astonishingly irresponsible “expertise” on smoking and cancer and has casually substituted ideology for analysis in saying “Government schools are islands of socialism.”
Titch has no credibility (and neither does his institute). You should object strongly to anyone taking seriously anything he says.
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(*While the cover page on his website is no longer quite so blatant the message remains the same; you can still get the older version from the wayback cache.)
September 5th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Cant wait to see Utopia in our area. Keep up the good work. Ya keep Qwest in check.
September 16th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Dab nab it! I’ve been busy working on many projects and missed this one. I’ll keep a closer eye out for future meetings.
It would have been fun to speak with the comcast rep. Sure, they can say whatever they like. It won’t change that they are terminating accounts to save on bandwidth. Obviously there isn’t enough to go around, and we’re happy to live in the 19th century copper pipe line as the world moves into the 21st Century.