Jacob 's Profile

Not all towns have been as lucky.

Take Tri-Cities, a trio of small towns in the Chicago suburbs: Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles. Tired of waiting for high-quality broadband, Tri-Cities proposed to forge ahead on its own in 2002 and put it to a vote.

When SBC and Comcast got wind of the plan, they went into combat mode. Both already provided high-speed services locally and felt another network wasn't necessary. Supporting the plan was Fiber For Our Future, a grass-roots group whose sole funding consisted of passing the hat at local meetings. In the face of an estimated $1 million advertising blitz by SBC and Comcast, the group never stood a chance. The plan was soundly defeated in a referendum in April 2003.

"They flat-out lied," says Annie Collins, a member of Fiber For Our Future. She says the carriers' claims that taxes would have skyrocketed "just weren't true."

SBC says all it did was get the facts out. Comcast says it only tried to make people aware of its full range of services.

SBC, for its part, contends that governments have no business getting into broadband. "Where private alternatives exist, government should not try to compete, especially when it's being done at the initiative of a few and at the expense of many," says Howard Peak, executive director of external affairs for SBC.

Fiber For Our Future isn't giving up. According to Collins, the group collected enough signatures — 3,000 — to put the broadband plan back on the ballot in November.

The core issue, she says, is control. "Why should somebody else decide what our destiny should be?" Collins asks. "Why not decide our own future?"

• GTDGmail
  
  • GTDGmail is a Firefox extension that integrates the highly effective methodology of “Getting Things Done” into the popular email service Gmail.
  
  

Encrypt all GMail traffic

• This is just a simple tip allowing you to encrypt your whole session. When you go to GMail.com only the login is encrypted. When you go to GMail.com. At https://gmail.google.com the whole session is encrypted.