Telecoms Suing Municipalities That Plan Broadband Access

Law.com has up a review of ongoing and historical cases of telecoms suing municipalities that plan broadband networks. In many cases those same telecoms have spent years ignoring as potential customers the cities and towns now undertaking Net infrastructure projects, only to turn around and sue them. One lawyer who has defended many municipalities in this position says, "This is similar to electrification a century ago when small towns and rural areas were left behind, so they formed their own authorities." Bob Frankston has been writing for years about the financial model of artificial scarcity that underlies the telecoms businss plans. This post gives some of the background to the telecoms' fear of abundance.

Comments

Re:The government?

[Anonymous Coward]

At one point in our history, electricity wasn't necessary infrastructure either.

Hence the TVA.

I argue that high-speed telecommunications infrastructure is necessary for a 21st-century economy. I'd like to hear your thoughts as to why you believe differently.

Re:open access

[afidel]

Actually if it wasn't for competitive water and sewer districts in London we probably wouldn't have come about with germ theory nearly as early as we did. You see on of the best pieces of evidence for germ theory came from a actuary working for a London insurance company, he mapped the outbreaks of various fatal diseases and eventually realized that while the deaths often seemed random that given enough outbreaks patterns emerged. When he investigated further the reason that one side of the street had an outbreak and the other not was what water district they were serviced by. This in turn led him to discover that water districts that obtained their water further downstream (and hence downstream from other districts sewer discharge) were more likely to have outbreaks.

Re:open access

[RulerOf]

Yes, and the bits will get from their fiber to the Internet via MAGIC.

No, no, they don't. Those bits would travel to the internet via Peering Agreements with Tier 1 ISP's. Bandwidth that is effectively paid for by the bit. Tier 1 ISP's don't pay eachother to swap data, because each considers traffic from the other to be just as important as its own.

Interestingly enough, if municipalities were to bond together to form a network large and important enough (maybe they could buy a couple /8's from Ford or whoever) to contain enough traffic to meet the absurd "settlement free" peering agreement requirements put forth by the cartel we know as Tier 1 ISP's... now that would be interesting.