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Judge Tosses Telco Suit Over City-Owned Network
tsa sends along news of the city of Monticello, Minnesota, which was sued by their local telco, Bridgewater Telephone Company, because the city chose to build a fiber optics network of their own. The judge dismissed their complaint of competition by a governmental organization. Quoting: "The judge's ruling is noteworthy for two things: (1) the judge's complete dismissal of Bridgewater Telephone Company's complaint and (2) his obvious anger at the underfunding of Minnesota's state courts. Indeed, the longest footnote in the opinion is an extended jeremiad about how much work judges are under and why it took so long to decide this case."
IANAL, but the second part is a warning to TDS against trying to waste more court time. The judge is saying that he's busy enough and therefore if TDS tries to revisit this, it would be another costly loss.
TDS lost a lot of money going after the city. They also lost a lot of revenue because they are now going to try and compete with the city (lol). And they lost the support of their community, who knows they sued the city for unwarranted tax dollars, and taxpayers love bailouts.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
A jeremiad is by definition an "extended critique".
May the Grammar Nazis have mercy on you.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I imagine that the telco must have had to get permits to lay their own fiber. The government could have blocked those requests until the result of the case was decided, thus cancelling-out the telco's attempt to delay the government and get a head start. I wonder why this didn't happen?
Let's all send the judge $5.00.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet...
This gives other community precedence in other lawsuits across the nation.
Once one telco falls, hopefully the other lawsuits will fall also, just like a row of dominos.
Because, let's face it, what every telco wants is to provide all communities of 12,000 people with fiber to the house. What a load of crap. TDS was doing their dog-in-the-manger act, and now is only putting in fiber as an act of revenge.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Usually a smart telco doesn't sue, they simply bribe the legislature into restricting their municipal competition (bottom of page).
(Basically, Comcast and Qwest bribed the Utah legislature into stopping their multi-muni competitor, UTOPIA, in Utah. The Utah ACLU's letter against such action is here: http://www.acluutah.org/utopia.htm)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Um, my vocabulary includes FORTRAN, COBOL and BASIC. Couldn't you have said "bitch" instead of "jeremiad"?
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
"jeremiad", now that's what Mark Twain would have called a 10-dollar word. I love it, and now I can dump my 10-cent word "rant".
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
I don't know why legalizing prostitution would reduce it, but we've had some positive effects since it was legalized here in Germany. Prostitutes now can get proper health insurance and have legal recourse against pimps (as pimping still is illegal). We didn't legalize prostitution to keep people from going to prostitutes; we legalized prostitution to improve the situation of the prostitutes. As far as I know it helped.
As for legalizing hemp: Yup, I agree there. Legalization would reduce most issues: It wouldn't be as much of an entry drug because you wouldn't buy it from dealers anymore. Hemp consumption wouldn't mean automatically providing money to criminals anymore. Legalization would allow regulation, which would lead to quality controls and thus better quality for the consumers*. Long-term studies would be easier. The situation for addicts would improve as there would be less social and legal danger involved in getting professional help.
Of course it's still a War On Something so we can't expect it to ever end.
* Wow, a sentence where I use the word "consumer" without feeling dirty.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
You're sticking to principles, but unfortunately for you the principle you've chosen isn't applicable. If your belief in free market competition had any bearing on reality, this thread wouldn't even exist, because every single dwelling on the planet with electricity would be served by 7 ultra-broadband Internet connections that the occupant could choose between on a whim. Manifestly this is not the case, so it's reasonable to question your assumptions.
First, is the market in question free? No, it isn't. Wired versions require access to public right-of-way. Wireless versions require access to public airwaves. Both are heavily regulated because they are shared, public resources that must be tightly controlled at a government level to maintain their accessibility and usability by as large a percentage of the population as possible. Wireless isn't really up to the task technologically, so I'll talk mainly about wired options.
At the moment, the accessibility and usability of public rights-of-way in the US are near enough as to be indistinguishable from 100%. Even the poorest non-citizen is allowed to walk along the roads, if nothing else. The vast majority of the population of the country drives on them, or is driven on them by their parents. The conclusion we may reach is that the current government regulation is working, and working extremely well. The fact that it is also a detriment to the free and easy deployment of new networks is a failure of deployment technology and financial vision rather than any inherent fault.
Second, is there competition in the market? No, there isn't. The various players in the broadband market function, in most regions, as a duopoly at best, and as a monopoly at worst (and in this particular case). Even in regions where there are nominally more than two potential providers, you'll find that their service areas interlace but do not overlap very much. All telecommunications providers in the US have been operating in a careful sort of gentleman's agreement not to intrude on each others markets. Whether these agreements are literal or metaphorical is irrelevant. It is fact that it is vanishingly rare for one of the national carriers to intrude on an established market of another carrier. They stake out their little (or large) territories and don't venture outside of them.
Why is this so? Because of a phrase that has been missing from this entire comment thread: "natural monopoly". Broadband communications is a natural monopoly, in the same manner that water and sewer and electrical service are natural monopolies. It's not quite a natural monopoly in the same way that roads are, since there are serious physical limits as to how many roads can reach my house, but it's very much a natural monopoly akin to the other services. There could easily be six or seven different water companies serving my house, in physical terms. There's plenty of room to lay the pipe required. It doesn't make any sense though. The capital outlay required to lay enormously redundant pipe is absurd, especially because, except for the one I'm subscribing to, it is guaranteed to be unused. The technology currently used to deploy broadband networks is expensive and the method for doing so directly interacts with the justifiably touchy regulatory regime of public rights-of-way mentioned above, making the whole proposition even more difficult and more expensive.
In this case, your vaunted capitalist system is working perfectly - private telecommunications companies are making the most efficient use of their capital expenditures, by NOT competing with one another. They can't. They haven't got the money to do it. The more successful competitors there are in a natural monopoly environment, the larger the waste in under-utilized infrastructure. If there are seven evenly matched competitors with 100% customer overlap, 85% of EACH of their cable plants are totally unused. Given the capital-intensive nature of even potentially providing the service, this scenario will never