{"id":799,"date":"2005-05-08T13:32:03","date_gmt":"2005-05-08T18:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=799"},"modified":"2005-05-08T13:32:03","modified_gmt":"2005-05-08T18:32:03","slug":"the-price-of-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=799","title":{"rendered":"The price of democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When a region wants to make a decision about whether to provide broadband as a publicly supported service, what better way than to put the matter to a vote?<br \/>\nHere&#8217;s what happened last year in an Illinois referendum about deploying a regional fiber network, according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.broadbandreports.com\/shownews\/63279\">BroadbandReports.com<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>SBC spent $192,324 on defeating the ballot measure, while Comcast spent $89,740. Fiber for our Future, the community group pushing the initiative, spent $4,325. Not months after the first vote failed, the Illinois area in question saw Comcast rate hikes as high as 33% in some neighborhoods.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Something is seriously wrong with democracy when this can happen.  It is old-fashioned to call for free campaign airtime, but I can&#8217;t think of a better way to actually rescue democracy from corporate purchase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When a region wants to make a decision about whether to provide broadband as a publicly supported service, what better way than to put the matter to a vote? Here&#8217;s what happened last year in an Illinois referendum about deploying a regional fiber network, according to BroadbandReports.com SBC spent $192,324 on defeating the ballot measure, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=799\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The price of democracy&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-rights"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-cT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}