Municipal Net Access: Unfair Competition?

ruvreve writes: "Net Economy has an article about how Los Angles is attempting to provide the ability for end-users to have a choice between multiple ISPs for high-speed bandwidth access, among other things. The article talks about how a city has an unfair advantage to offer such services. Unfair because the government monitors and regulates the cable and phone company but at the same time wants to compete for their customers. If it gets 100Mbit access to my front door it HAS to be good!" This issue's been raised a few times before, but the article raises some points worth thinking about.

Comments

Who owns the roads?

[Bonker]

With a few exceptions, the public utility that most americans think least about... Our public road and highway infrastructure, is completely publicly owned. There's just no way to effectively manage an entire system of roads cost-effectively at a profit.

There exist a few turnpikes, toll-roads, and troll bridges out there... (*rimshot*) but for the most part Americans are used to paying for the right to use the system out of tax dollars.

Power is going the same way, as can be evidenced by the collapse of the California power grid. How long will the state pay for the power companies to stay solvent until the state becomes the primary power-provider? Phone will go too, IMHO.

Internet is going to be the next public utility, probably even before the phone system. Already communities all over the country are building 'municipal' internet services. Look for these to become tax-supported in the near future.

Re:broadband and business

[FatRatBastard]

Why in god's name should they subsidize it? If people don't want it they don't want it.

Since there's no demand for solid gold toilets should the gov't subsidize it to generate interest?

Re:Oh my god

[FaithAndReason]

Note that the two detractors cited in the article were representatives of cable companies, not ILECs (it mentions that the NCTA primarily lobbies for cable companies.)

What's their beef? "'Don't forget that they (the city) make us carry unnecessary community channels, they force us to provide local infrastructure...'" <verysmallviolin>Such a terrible burden, to actually give something to the community!</verysmallviolin>

The lobbyist goes on to bemoan the fact that "Municipal power boards can offer service at a fraction of the price of a private competitor. Cities use existing rights of way from the power grid to lay their networks, they face a reduced regulatory burden to get the license to operate and they do not have to run at a profit".

Then he pulls out his trump card: "At the end of the day it boils down to, do we want the government being in this business?"

Well, I'm about as anti-government as any slashdotter, but it seems to me this is exactly the business we want the government to be in. Unless we want to actually have multiple "pipes" leading to each and every home and office, the responsibility for building and maintaining the lowest level of the network infrastructure should belong to the same sort of institution responsible for maintaining the water, electricity, sewer, etc.

After all, if they really want to put their money where their mouth is, the telcos and cablecos can just lease the city's infrastructure and gain the advantage of all those cost savings. It remains to be seen whether they spend their money on that, rather than on more lobbyists...

Sad commentary on how public views government

[Infonaut]

What's interesting to me about this debate isn't so much the particulars of it, but what the presence of the debate itself reveals about how we view goverment in this country.

You can't get much more local than city government. We're not talking about behemoth state governments or the federal government here. And yet here we are debading whether it's unfair for one of the smallest units of government, one of the entities closest to the people who elected it, to offer us services for our taxes.

The privatization of government services seems to have gone so far that we now seriously consider almost every city government function replaceable by private contractors (security services, health services, and so on), yet for local government to "intrude" into an arena now dominated by huge for-profit entities is somehow taboo.

Government is often painfully inefficient - I say that because I've worked in government. But it baffles me that when the people from our own neighborhoods whom we elected to help our cities run better actually offer something superior to what private industry can offer, we run screaming that the free markets are being sabotaged.

Ah, how far we have come.