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Google Fiber's Latest FCC Filing: Comcast's Nightmare Come To Life

Posted by timothy on from the just-want-to-seek-some-of-the-same-rents dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from BGR: What's every incumbent ISP's worst nightmare? If we had to guess, it looks something like the filing that Google just made with the Federal Communications Commission. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Google this week told the FCC that reclassifying broadband providers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act would have a big side benefit for Google Fiber because it would give Google Fiber the same access to utility poles and other key infrastructure currently enjoyed by Comcast, AT&T and other big-name ISPs.

1 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What rules prevent them from doing this already by mea_culpa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in the 80s and 90s lots of smaller cable companies lobbied local governments and were granted easement access to install their poles, wires, and equipment. Many poles belonged to various utility companies and Ma Bell and access was also negotiated with them. This is a very long process with lots and lots of red tape.

    Bigger companies like Comcast bought these smaller companies primarily for these rights. Anywhere smaller companies overlapped the wires were pulled off of poles to prevent any chance of a competitor gaining easy access to these rights. Any new competitor would now need to start from the very beginning like the smaller companies did in the 80s and 90s in obtaining access.

    In my city we had a choice of Dimension Cable and Cable America in the 80s and 90s. Both of these smaller companies did all of the busy work for Cox which gobbled both of them up and dismantled the redundant perfectly good infrastructure of Cable America.
    Comcast did this on a much larger scale.