BILL HOBBS WRITES:

Some 37 million U.S. households will have a home network by 2008, four times as many as do now, as people branch out from networking their multiple computers to connecting their networks to entertainment equipment and then, later, to household appliances, predicts Forrester Research. Of course, all of the above will be illegal in Tennessee without the permission of the cable company or telecom that provides your broadband Internet access, if legislation currently moving through the Tennessee legislature passes. Under HB 457 and SB 213, if the cable company or telecom does not expressly authorize you to connect a device to their service, the legal inference is automatically created that you intended to defraud the service provider. What follows could then be civil and/or criminal legal proceedings against you.

Hobbs wonders why this is getting so little coverage from newspapers and TV in Tennessee. So do I. There’s a hearing today.

As I wrote in my TechCentralStation column yesterday, this kind of legislation undercuts FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s argument that the openness of the Internet means that we don’t need to worry about media concentration. If Powell were busy defending the Internet against this sort of intrusion, I’d feel a lot better about his claims.

Here’s a story by Farhad Manjoo in Salon that quotes both me and Howard Bashman on this. We’re both skeptical of Powell’s position. (You’ll have to sit through a short ad for Sid Blumenthal’s book if you’re not a subscriber).