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Bill Would Reverse Bans On Municipal Broadband
Yuppie writes "A bill introduced to the House this week would overturn bans that currently exist in several states that forbid cities and towns building and deploying their own broadband networks. The big telecoms may not be be too happy about the bill, however: 'The telecoms have historically argued that municipalities that own and operate — or even build and lease — broadband networks could give themselves preferential treatment. The Act anticipates that argument with a section on "competition neutrality." Public providers would be banned from giving themselves any "regulatory preference," which should create a level playing field for all broadband providers. Municipalities interested in getting into the broadband business would also have to solicit feedback from the private sector on planned deployments.' The full text of the bill (pdf) is available from Rep. Boucher's website."
how the FUCK is that any different to what telecoms do NOW? i bet at&t give themselfs preferential treatment on lines they install to. what a bunch of 2 faced cockheads.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Goddamn activist legislators preventing ordinary Americans being price gouged by ISPs.
Don't they know that that's SOCIALISM? And SOCIALISM is not just automatically bad, but Anti-American(TM) even when its not.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
If an ISP decided it would be cool to allow uncapped transfer over their network (ie, no cost of switching to another ISP), would that be considered preference?
I really have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, it'd be nice to actually get something cool like this for my tax dollars. On the other, I definitely don't want to see my city out-compete our wonderful local ISPs. If/when they became the only game in down, what's their incentive to maintain the networks? Will Joe Cityadmin give a rat's butt if I call to complain about an outage? And above all else, do I really want the government (even the friendly local variety) being my gateway to the Internet? I have nightmares of hearing a prosecuting attorney saying something like "our city access records indicate you posted anti-government statements to a communist website called Dotslash." Maybe that's unlikely, but tell me honestly you can't hear a mayor explaining how his city's network will be "a safe place for our children to play thanks to our new monitoring and filtering system" to thunderous applause. If there's a vibrant ecosystem of private competition in an area, great. If not...
Help me out here. Do I root for the cities to undercut big telco (whom I customarily hate on general principles), or for private enterprise to win out over the government's desire to protect me from myself?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
As long as it's not paid for by the tax-payer I don't see the problem. Otherwise it's just a waste.
municipalities get fed up at the empty promises the Telco's give them about getting them wired, and how they can't make money if the municipality does it themselves.. Given how the Telco's already squandered the millions of dollars that were supposed to be used for upgrading broadband, I would be in favor of locking out Telco's all together. Like hell I am going to pay for my city to upgrade its broadband only to hand it over to a corporation to get neutered, all the while they [the telco] will complain that "this setup sucks, if you had let us install it as we promised, it would have been better!"
So, if I understand this properly, the telecoms don't want municipalities to give themselves "preferential treatment". That makes sense.
Wait a second. Are these the same telecoms that want to be able to sell "preferential treatment" at the detriment of everyone else? As a matter of fact, I think they are.
The only possible conclusion I can draw from this is as follows: it's okay for large companies to fuck people over, but governments damn well better... not. Or something.
What the telecoms need to realize is that the governments have been fucking us over for centuries, if not longer, to the point that they've nearly perfected it to a (very perverse) form of art. The telecoms can't hope to compete, though that doesn't seem to be stopping them.
I own itburns.net. What should I put there?
Ya know, I keep thinking about the Constitution's mandate to build postal roads, and I'm still having trouble understanding why the national government is not the primary interstate ISP, and why the state and local governments are not the primary state and local ISPs.
I understand the dangers in letting the government bureaucracy develop cutting edge tech, but, if the state is always so bad with infrastructure tech, why aren't more bridges falling down every year?
joudanzuki, with reservations
Price drops? Hell no, 10% across the board price jump to cover "losses due to unfair/unconstitutional competition" and add an extra year to contract lock-ins.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Our internet service comes from our light department. Our town has no cable, and DSL covers only about half the town due to it's size. Last year the municipal light dept rolled out WiMax. It's not perfect, but it's damn better than dial-up. Before they went ahead though they had to write a letter to Verizon to get permission to enter the market, presumably due to this law or fear of it. Fortunately Verizon said yes (our town has only 1500 or so homes in it, so they probably didn't care - too busy rolling Fios out to people who already have broadband I guess) If Verizon had said no for some reason though, my phone line would be busy right now, and I probably wouldn't have loaded this article yet. So yes it's a good thing for competition in existing broadband markets, but it may also encourage other frightened municipalities from providing missing service.
Interesting that the US is taking a rather regulation-friendly route! In Sweden, anyone can apply to each local municipality to pull your own fiber - and I have never heard anyone being denied that. In rural areas aswell as cities, many municipalities have pulled their own fibers in order to give their areas a improved competitive edge when any of the main telcos have not been up to the task quick enough. The business model many have choosen is a completely open one; the offer to lease dark fibers, wavelenghts on lit fibers, and in many cases all the way up to the IP level. And yes, they will give themselves preferential treatments by connecting schools, administrations and hospitals to a well working, high-capacity network at competitive cost -. a service level that would not have been available to them otherwise. Many individual networks are interconnected, forming regional gigabit networks. Facilities for co-location of equipment is generally also on offer. I believe most Telcos has seen this as an opportunity since it gives the access to more infrastructure at lower risk of investment. I woud attribute the high broadband penetration and low costs in Sweden partly to this de-regulation. According to recent figures 97% of the households can have at least DSL access and about 20% have a fiber to their home.
Here in Stockholm, there is a city owned company called Stokab, they build and own fibers to city owned apartment buildings as well as coop/condo buildings that sign a contract with the company. This company only owns and maintains the fibers, another company, called OpenNet, operates the fiber network. The actual services are provided by private companies, who are allowed equal access to the network. I have a choice between about 8 ISP's (with speeds between 10 and 100 Mbps both downstream and upstream, costing about 300 SEK (32/$45)/month for 100/100 Mbps), 4 VoIP providers, and (only) 2 TV providers, all operating over the fiber.
You owe me a new keyboard.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Which part of the U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to do this? Does the 10th amendment mean anything anymore?
I wager the future of public internet access will be a combined effort of private and public initiatives. Take for example the town of Brookline, MA, which recently implemented the nations first border-to-border wireless internet access system. It was an initiative based in the town, organized by the local government, but implemented by a private firm (Strix Systems I believe) to get a professional infrastructure in place. Although it's a pay service for most homes, public hotspots exist in parks, recreational areas, and some public housing. In short, with this bill I think we can at least look forward to more systems like this cropping up, which blur the line between municipal implementation and private enterprise. In the end, it means more choice for the consumer and more pervasive internet access for the people themselves.
Why don't we go ahead and put all goods and services in the hands of the government, because everything would be cheaper, right? Because they're not operating for a profit? I don't want to pay for your broadband, or anyone else's, with my tax dollars. Nor do I want my Internet regulated by those who brought us the PATRIOT act, the DMV, and the IRS. The government is terrible at managing cost-effective solutions to anything because they're spending other people's money. Take this million-dollar outhouse, for example: http://www.jldr.com/oh1mill.html . "The whole project is loaded with Park Service overhead. The agency already has spent $860,000 for design and construction supervision teams. In all, the job could end up costing taxpayers more than $6 million." It's a four-holer outhouse with no running water. The worst argument for municipal broadband that I've heard is that it helps the poor who can't afford Internet access. I suppose we'll be buying them laptops with WiFi, too. The people that benefit most from municipal broadband are the people that can afford it but don't want to pay. If you want Internet access, pay for it. It's a luxury item that didn't exist in the public's perception fifteen short years ago. Don't levy taxes on the poor who can't afford or need a MySpace page so you can read Slashdot for free.