Mother Jones magazine looks into the push polls and heavy spending in Illinois that defeated a municipal network: The article, outlined by Esme Vos over at Muniwireless.com, walks through how SBC and Comcast tried to scare local voters who then thinly voted against a broadband initiative. It apparently also delves into the politics of The Heartland Institute and its sock puppetry.
"Case got Bast to admit that he never studied enough cases to show that most municipal networks operate at a loss," Esme writes. As I wrote about extensively and have continued to show, most of the case studies that Heartland used are derived from a Beacon Hill Institute report that relied on out of date information and misinterpreted details. Ashland, Oregon, appears to be the only network actually running in the red, while the others cited are doing quite nicely, especially Tacoma Power's Click! Network.