The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

The Messenger-Post coverage of Eric Massa's Henrietta town hall says that Time-Warner's caps were the main topic of conversation there. Sconsetmonkey has an account of an encounter with Time-Warner reps at the Pittsford town hall, and Rochesterturning promises video of Massa's town hall soon.

As this issue comes to a boil in the 29th, Time-Warner and its industry mouthpieces are laying down fresh new tranches of bullshit. Here's a classic:

"According to industry analysts, the infrastructure may not be able to accommodate the explosion of online content by 2012,” Landel Hobbs, chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable said in an online statement. “This could result in Internet brownouts. It will take a lot of money to fix the problem...”

As has been reported here, the cost for Time-Warner to upgrade its network to support 10X the amount of current traffic is between $20-$100 per subscriber. Also, Time-Warner's per-subscriber bandwidth costs have actually been decreasing. There's something "brown" here all right, but it's not the Internet.

According to Stop the Cap, an industry magazine wonders if Eric Massa's Corning ties are the reason he supports anti-cap legislation. Corning produces fiber-optic cable, and Verizon's FiOS uses fiber-optic cable, so Massa must want FiOS deployment. After more thought, the columnist concludes:

To me, a simpler explanation is that Massa, a freshman congressman, is looking to score populist points and easy press with an anti-corporate tirade.

That is a simpler explanation, if you're an industry shill. "Populism" has become an all-purpose smear word attached to anyone representing citizens' legitimate interests. It's clear that a 4X increase in Internet charges is not in the best interest of Rep. Massa's constituents, and he was elected to represent them, not a corporate monopoly.