When the City of Austin, Texas promoted an ambitious plan to lay fibre to the door and create a municipal network that any number of operators could use, the 74th Texas Legislature passed a 1995 bill that prevented municipalities from getting involved in telecommunications as part of a larger telecom deregulation bill. Now the Pennsylvania legislature has done something similar, enacting legislation including a prohibition against any political subdivision deploying broadband services - effectively stopping the Wireless Philadelphia project and others like it. The incumbent telecommunications providers obviously support (or drive) initiatives like this, protecting their interests, arguably at the expense of other kinds of economic development that might be fostered by pervasive access to free or cheap broadband services. Do we want all roads across cyberspace to be private toll roads? (Via Xeni at boingboing.