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Florida Court Overturns AT&T Cable Ordinance
jothenull writes: "A Florida judge ruled that a "Broward County ordinance requiring cable giant AT&T to allow rival Internet access to their systems violated the First Amendment."" Available wherever AP articles are found. Since cable systems get a monopoly from local municipalities, it only seems fair that they be required to fulfill certain requirements - carrying a diversity of programming, permitting access to a variety of ISPs - but the cable services are fighting their part of the bargain tooth and nail.
Certian companies may have a wire monopoly but that monopoly is not mandated by the city, they have a wire monopoly because they own the fucking wire and can do whatever the hell they want to do with it (or should, but when it comes to telecomm the feds like to play fast and loose with private property rights.) Nothing is stopping another carrier from coming in and laying wire but the cost of doing so, if you're really that upset about your choices raise some capital and build your own network. The only way I can see how the city could somehow sanction a monopoly would be by a corrupt offical denying access to city owned right of ways to a competitor wishing to lay wire, of course if that ever happened in a sizable market you can bet that the competitors being locked out in this way would be screaming bloody murder to the FCC.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Apparently the ruling has been reversed. The judge was confused about the placement of the "Yay" and "Nay" check boxes in the paper work.
Where I live, AT&T (formerly TCI) has been the only cable company in town for the last 20 years. So many people have complained about the service, though, that the city finally signed an additional contract with another cable company (I don't recall the name). It'll take a couple years for the new company to get their infrastructure in place, but it will be interesting to see whether things improve once people here have a real choice.
"A Florida judge ruled that a "Broward County ordinance requiring cable giant AT&T to allow rival Internet access to their systems violated the First Amendment.""
It seems interesting that whenever an individual's rights get stomped on by a corporation nobody in power seems to care. Yet when a corporations "rights" are threatened, a ruling in favor of the company is made.
Now I realize that this is a company vs a county but still.. I had no idea that corporations had First Amendment rights.
Disclaimer: The link was down when I tried to read the linked article so I am only going on what the blurb said.
own the fucking wire and can do whatever the hell they want to do with it (or should, but when it comes to telecomm the feds like to play fast and loose with private property rights.)
Of course, the telephone and cable companies benefit from that as well. I don't remember signing any deals about the phone or cable companies being allowed to dig a big trench in my front yard, yet they seem to feel free to do so.
Perhaps AT&T would prefer that the various levels of government stop 'playing fast and loose' with private property rights and instead, negotiate a private contract with each and every property owner in every area they serve. Surely negotiating millions of contracts and being subject to the whims of millions of property owners would be a small price to pay compared to leasing their lines at reasonable market rates to other companies. Or they could just go out of business if they prefer.
I would suggest to Broward County that next time the contract comes up, give AT&T the choice of a 1 billion dollar surcharge, open up the lines, or abandon the lines and get out of town. I'll bet they take the second option. If they choose the third, it'll be easy enough to get someone else to provide the service by renting the county's newly aquired cables.
I really fail to see how being required to open their lines to other ISPs prevents AT&T from saying anything they want. Hhere's the first amendment violation?
Cable companies are usually required to obtain a franchise agreement, which grants them the authority to use local city-owned rights-of-way in exchange for a number of things, including, requirements such as providing "open access" to competing ISPs. The agreements are basically lease agreements, leasing the city property in return for consideration.
By law, a municipality cannot grant an exclusive franchise (monopoly), and in fact, most cities are busily trying to lure competitors to their local cable companies into town. They hate having a single cable company as much as the citizens do. But the cost of building a new system is large, and only recently have companies begun to step forward to try and "overbuild" old systems, like AT&T's. The arrival of these overbuilders has less to do with anything congress did (i.e. telecom Act of 1996) than it does the perceived opportunity to run the old coax companies out of business, by building modern state of the art ringed fiber networks, which can offer voice, video, and data at rates and speed vastly exceeding anything that can be done on a crapulent old Coax system. Take a look at Western Integrated Networks proposed system as an example of what these new arrivals want to build. Notice, the fully symmetric 100baseTX ethernet network provided into homes, via a fiber actually brought into the house? That ought to get any self-respecting geek's heart pumping fast.
In regards to "Open Access", the more important thing happening, is th activities resulting from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Mt. Hood v. AT&T, where the court ruled that @Home was a telecommunications service, not a cab;le service. This ruling will require (if left to stand) that cable comapnies be regulated identically to telephone companies, and thus will be forced to offer competitive access to their networks.
Imagine if your power company also marketed and sold household appliances, tvs, computer equipment, and so forth.
What would happen if they said to their competition, "No, you cannot use our power grid to run your devices. It is an infringement on our rights!"
Gee.. wouldn't that be wacky and interesting?
Wrong. Under federal law, CFR 47, no city may grant an exclusive franchise to *any* cable operator. It's illegal to create a monopoly in this way, and no city does it, and hasn't in 50 years.
``Compelled access like that ordered by the Broward County ordinance both penalizes expression and forces the cable operators to alter their content to conform to an agenda they do not set,'' the decision said.
Perhaps. However, look at the issue of penalizing expression from the flip side of the coin.
The article appropriately invoked the specter of the AOL-Time Warner merger. In the case of AOL/TW, a single corporate conglomerate will control 1. A considerable array of content and 2. a significant percentage of the U.S. cable infrastructure.
If the FCC/FTC fails to ensure that AOL/TW opens up its pipeline to competing ISP's, the corporation would be in a unique position to selectively discriminate against competing ISP's and content providers.
To better illustrate this the consequences of Closed Access, consider a well-known white paper from Cisco released in 1999 called Controlling Your Network - A Must for Cable Operators.
The Cisco paper includes such gems as this:
Committed access rate (CAR) is an edge-focused QoS mechanism provided by selected Cisco IOS-based network devices. The controlled-access rate capabilities of CAR allow you to specify the user access speed of any given packet by allocating the bandwidth it receives, depending on its IP address, application, precedence, port, or even Media Access Control (MAC) address. For example, if a "push" information service that delivers frequent broadcasts to its subscribers is seen as causing a high amount of undesirable network traffic, you can direct CAR to limit subscriber-access speed to this service. You could restrict the incoming push broadcasts as well as subscribers' outgoing access to the push information site to discourage its use. At the same time, you could promote and offer your own or partner's services with full-speed features to encourage adoption of your services, while increasing network efficiency.
In other words, a cable operator using Cisco's equipment will be able to selectively discriminate what content a consumer can view, slow down content originating from a competing content provider -- in the words of many Open Access proponents, transforming the "information superhighway" into a "digital toll-road."
Even if the ruling mentioned in this post is correct, I believe that the alternative to mandating open access will result in more significant penalties to free expression.
Sincerely,
Vergil
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