I’m writing concerning Alliance for High quality Broadband Maine’s marketing campaign, which was just lately waged in my city.
On June 17, a brand new Fb feed, “Broadband For Maine – Defend Southport,” popped up. The title caught my consideration. After studying the content material, I questioned their involvement in my island’s neighborhood fiber optic broadband vote, and I used to be censored. My cousin (considered one of our city’s librarians) witnessed this and we began monitoring their web page.
Southport’s mailboxes had been inundated with Alliance for High quality Broadband Maine flyers, and we discovered who was backstage solely after the June 28 vote to reject the mission, within the investigative reporting by Maine Public Radio’s Steve Mistler.
His July 7 story, “Constitution-funded group campaigns in opposition to Maine municipal broadband, riling residents and ‘companions,’ ” revealed that Constitution Communications (Spectrum’s company father or mother) financially contributed and that their efforts had been executed by an in-state consulting agency, Resurgam Group.
On July 12, the net podcast Techdirt ran a narrative headlined “Constitution’s Working a Faux Shopper Group in Maine That’s Killing Neighborhood Broadband – With the Assist of A Democratic Advisor.”
Techdirt’s Karl Bode reported, “It’s not that tough for a monopoly to spend just a few hundred thousand to scuttle such a vote. That’s nice for them, because it saves them thousands and thousands in potential aggressive complications, however it will possibly usually wind up hurting the taxpayers these bogus teams faux to be so breathlessly involved about.”
If a longtime West Coast web watchdog is elevating questions publicly about efforts to derail Maine’s rural broadband initiatives, shouldn’t we be doing the identical?
Sarah Sherman
Southport Island
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