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A State-By-State Guide To Restrictive Community Broadband Laws
blottsie writes On Tuesday, President Obama will unveil a dramatic push to improve broadband Internet service for people around the country through community-built municipal broadband networks. Problem is, state legislatures around the country have passed laws making it considerably more difficult for these public Internet projects to get off the ground. In some states, building municipal broadband is prohibited altogether. This piece dives into the state laws standing between us and more competitive Internet service markets.
I live in GA, and I see that here the service is unregulated. Does that mean that my local municipality can build something out? If so, what is stopping them? I have either Cramcost or AT&T DSL, and I would like the option of Google or some other fiber. Please help me understand!
>> deep-pocketed government entities from undercutting a private sector unable to keep up
Funniest thing I read all day.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please, I don't mind.
That being said, I was under the impression that - yes there are some laws/ordinances prohibiting (or outright banning) municipal broadband from happening - it was COST and MAINTENANCE of the actual infrastructure that was stopping these communities.
This is why we need a federal government to put the hammer down. To hell with 'states rights'!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It seems to me the article addresses less than half the problem. In many cities and counties, one cable has been granted a legal franchise - effectively a government-enforced monopoly outlawing other companies providing better service to compete. Because right now providers are needing to build out fiber networks anyway, overbuilders who compete with incumbents have done quite well, where they are allowed to do so. That say this is because they are going into areas where Comcast or Time Warner has an existing COAX network. The new competitor builds a FIBER network. Comcast doesn't have a huge advantage since they also have to build their own fiber network to compete.
The article assumes without evidence that politicians would do a better job of running an ISP than processionals can. Looking at the actual results from city projects vs private over builders suggests the opposite - frequently after cities make a huge mess of the project hiring the mayor's brother-in-law to build it at 250% of the going rate, they end up selling the half-completed network to an experienced company who finishes the job and provides good service.
Can we get a list of states or major cities that allow private competition? I know some parts of the Austin metro area have four or five companies competing, and you can get good service at a great price.
On one hand, free access to information is arguably a fundamental right. The simple fact is, our governments are moving more and more towards online services. It's more painful, for example, in my state, to attempt to set up an appointment at the DMV via phone, than it is to click a few buttons on a web form. (And heaven forfend you simply show up without an appointment - hope you have a week of vacation saved up. I'm only slightly exaggerating.)
On the other hand, the Federal government has no mandate, nor any business whatsoever, backing public Internet access projects. This is solely within the domain of the powers of individual states.
On that third mutated hand, a man in a funny hat named Lincoln bitchslapped the sovereign power of states (admittedly, for perhaps worthy goals) with extreme prejudice, so screw that noise - grind the states and municipalities into dust if they want to suck the phallus of monopolizing providers.
Laws prohibiting municipal broadband are entirely anti-city. In a country where politics is such that cities are routinely decried (while ironically states redistribute their tax revenues to rural areas and suburbs), I think it is time to frame broadband rights as a freedom from government for cities.
Cities should be allowed to be more independent from the states that hold them. They should not be stripped of the competitive advantages that localized economies of scale provide. They should be allowed to offer their own utilities, to toll the interstates that cut through them, and they shouldn't have to pay a gasoline tax that largely serves rural interests, and above all, part of that independence should be to allow them to offer broadband.
This is my sig.
It means that completely inept local bureaucrats can squander tax money, run up debt and leave you with a marginally functional broadband service that gets sold to comcast for a dime on the dollar.
You are wrong again, it isn't a matter of tax monies, but the authority of the municipality to act.
Check out Chattanooga's EPBFi. They showed they could do it on the expected revenue from customers rather than taxes.
... Looking at the actual results from city projects vs private over builders suggests the opposite - frequently after cities make a huge mess of the project hiring the mayor's brother-in-law to build it at 250% of the going rate, they end up selling the half-completed network to an experienced company who finishes the job and provides good service.
...
References please
captcha == cynical
people want bad enough to be willing to pay for it
But people willing to pay and broadband companines willing to provide are two different things. In most cases, public utilities have a much lower cost structure than private enterprise. So they can justify providing service in ares which might not attract private investment at this time. The private providers allocate resources based upon maximising their ROI. And so it might be a while before the most profitable neighborhoods are wires up and they get around to the lower revenue areas. Or perhap never. But what they don't want is to have lower cost providers step in and pick off the marginal territories while they are holding them back.
Wall Street demands earnings growth and, should they lose access to these second tier customers, their businesses might start to look like they are in the 'mature' part of their business cycles. And that's when investors start squeezing corporate boards for increases in efficiency. Like lower mangement salaries, less Hookers & Blow, fewer private jets, etc. Everyone likes to be in a growth market. Nobody (in private business) likes to maintain infrastructure, keep the snow plowed and potholes fixed. But that's what municipalities are good for.
This is why Comcast and TWC wan to merge. It produces high levers of capital activity that investors have a hard time differentiating from O&M expenses. And so upper management looks like they are accomplishing things.
Have gnu, will travel.
That the federal government is going to have to step in and prohibit state/county/city/other legislation restricting internet access. Such a thing is not without recent precedent. Our state recently enacted a law that prohibits counties/cities/towns/etc from enacting gun laws so that state laws could be followed.
I remember a few years ago Verizon stopped expanding FIOS and cited just these sort of local restrictions as the primary reason they stopped. Pity for those of you who don't have FTTP service available.
"Inside Obama's Ambitious Plan to Make Your Internet Suck Less"
Make it suck less? How about getting rid of all that crappy Javascript that gets put into news articles--especially those floating navigation headers.
You are supporting an extremely dangerous position:
That would lead inexorably to cities gaining all the advantages while the spaces between them become ghettos of housing for cheap city labor. The whole point of state-wide responsibility is to ensure that inequalities don't mushroom out of control and create a poverty-ridden dystopia for the disadvantaged.
The last thing cities need is more benefits. They must bear a duty and responsibility for the areas around them from which they draw so many resources.
Soo.. The municipal efforts are an inefficient end-run around shitty franchise deals?
Citizens: We want better internet.
Existing franchise: Go fuck yourselfs. You'll take what we give you, at the price we sell it.
Citizens: This sucks. Hey City, help us out.
City: Well, we can't let a competing company start up because of this franchise agreement signed 25 years ago. Maybe we can set up our own internet service as a utility.
Citzens: Yay!
Existing franchise: Shit. I don't want to spend money to build competing infrastructure. Hey. Where are those politicians we bribe? What do we pay them for anyway?
Politicians: Socialism! If God had intended for cities to provide broadband it would have been written in the bible!
City: Shit, this is hard. Lets turn the project over to someone who knows what they are doing.
Existing Franchise: Shit. Now we have to compete and lower our prices.
Citizens: Well, internet is better and now I have more choices.
Politicians: Death panels! Terroist fistbumps! Benghazi!
That say this is because they are going into areas where Comcast or Time Warner has an existing COAX network. The new competitor builds a FIBER network. Comcast doesn't have a huge advantage since they also have to build their own fiber network to compete.
The technology already exists to crank up COAX cable speeds to 1Gbit.
Docsis 3.1 is allegedly going to be 10/1 Gbit capable, though it will depend on the quality of the COAX to your home.
The only catch is that the hardware isn't ready yet, it's still being designed and built
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
> City: Well, we can't let a competing company start up because of this franchise agreement signed 25 years ago. Maybe we can set up our own internet service as a utility.
Exclusive contracts are already illegal.
I should mention that politicians are probably better at passing laws than ISPs are. Each type of organization has it's own structure and it's own specialty. The city council promotes fairness and deliberativeness by taking holding two public hearings and taking six months to weigh a decision. That's good since they are passing laws.
The company that builds new fiber networks makes decisions much quicker, and that's good because we want the whole city built out in a year or two, not ten or twenty years. So it's not that private companies are BETTER than political bodies, they're just designed to do different things. Here are some references. You can recognize easily find 80 more like them.
Memphis Networx was sold at a loss of over $27 million
Burlington, Vermont lost $17 million in taxpayer dollars
Mooresville and Davidson losing $8 million each year
Utopia $200 million debt is four times their other municipal debt, for all other infrastructure
Chattanooga lost their credit rating did to overwhelming debt from their government broadband attempt
Again, this isn't because government is BAD. It's because US government is designed to be fair, transparent, inclusive, and deliberative, not fast or efficient. To get a huge fiber network rolled out across an entire city in just a couple of years, and do it without spending $10,000 per customer, you need a fast and efficient organization. US governments aren't fast and efficient because they shouldn't be - they should be deliberative, transparent, and equitable.
That's true, my cable company, Suddenlink, is delivering high speeds with coax for the last mile. They are spending a billion dollars* or something to upgrade their network to make that happen. At the same time, a competitor can spend the same billion dollars to build fiber, or to build their own high-speed coax. The old, soggy coax that Comcast already has can't provide those speeds, so they have to do new build just like the new competitor does, partially erasing Comcast's advantage from being there first.
* I don't remember if it's a billion dollars, two billion, or $250 million. The point is, they have to put in NEW coax plant and that's expensive, they can't just use the old.
Yes this post is slightly simplistic, not going into fine details, but the point stands - over builders are doing much better lately by providing next-generation networks rather than matching the incumbents' investment in old networks.
References please
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
"gubmint bad! monopoly i mean capitalism good!"
*drool* snort
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of Public Utility Districts in the country that provide electricity and telephone service to their customers often with lower cost and higher quality of service than the for profit competitors. They have boards elected from the customer base and their only focus is providing the service to their customers. I see no reason that can't work for internet connections as well.
FTFY: tax-financed gubmint monopoly bad! consumer choice and free markets good!
("*drool* snort"? You should have that looked at.)
I think that could, in the modern American political discourse, be the refrain. Have a look at a map. Generally speaking, urban areas vote blue and in favor of some sort of a national vision, whereas rural areas consistently lap up a steady diet of misinformation that says they are supporting the cities when every outlay from the state capitals to even the federal government suggests the opposite is true. The rural areas say they hate government and redistribution of wealth - fine - then let them do without the wealth redistributed to them and maybe cities, unshackled by them, can begin to turn their own finances around.
This is my sig.
>. State governments ban local governments from creating broadband networks at the request of telecom monopolies and you stand on a pulpit and preach about government non-interference. They are interfering by granting these monopolies in the first place!
We're in agreement there, 100%. Governments shouldn't grant monopolies to their donors. Where we see things differently is that perhaps you've never heard of Suddenlink or any of the two hundred other cable companies that aren't Comcast and Time Warner. Suddenlink just upgraded everyone to 50-100Mbps at no additional charge. Suddenlink gave me their technical manager's cell phone number when the customer service agent realized I knew more than he did. There is no evidence that only the corrupt politicians can run an ISP. In fact, we see that Suddenlink does it quite well, and their customers are happy. Google fiber has many happy customers, some getting the service for free*. So to make it illegal for Suddenlink to come in and offer better service than Comcast, at a lower price, is stupid. Not stupid for the politicians - Comcast is paying for their campaigns. Stupid for voters who support such nonsense.
If a city wants to getting into the ISP business, fine. Chances are, it fails and they sell the fiber to Google, after the taxpayers lose their ass on it. That's fine if they want to try, though. What they shouldn't do is make it illegal for Suddenlink to offer better service than the cirlty, at half the price the city charges.
I work for a government agency that competes directly with private companies. We offer some of the best programs in the world, and have world-renowned staff because if we didn't do a damn good job the private companies who do would get our customers. When we can beat the private competition, we partner with them to offer services customized for the needs of of local citizens and our other customers. The "other customers" pay our bills, local citizens get our services for free - without even funding us through tax dollars.
How do you know? They effectively seem to be piggy-backing on the infrastructure created and paid for by electric customers. That's probably a great way of keeping down costs. But the only reason this ends up being "municipal" is because the power company itself started out municipal. If private power companies were less regulated elsewhere, you'd probably see these kinds of offerings all over the place.
I had a typo. When we CAN'T do a better job than the private companies we compete with, we partner with them.
If the entire model seems completely foreign, consider state colleges and universities, who compete with private colleges to attract students. We're the same. We're a government agency just like the University of California is, and we compete just like UC competes with private universities.
Yes, they are using the existing utility poles and rights of way, and having the local organization of the power board helped out as well, but the former is practiced all over the place anyway.
As for power companies, as long as we can shoot the leaders of companies like Enron, that's fine. Oh wait, they get to screw us, we don't even get to prosecute them for their felonies? Never mind.
We don't need Comcast, Verizon or Google. IPv6 gave us fc00::/7 - use it. That's about 72-trillion possible Network/Subnet addresses for you.
a beowulf cluster of rasberry PI's.
A 3TB drive of your favorite porn/ Slashdot stories.
100 ft of Cat 5 to your neighbors house - hell, run fiber, you know you want to.
We really ought to do this before a bunch of university students figure it out first. If you live in a rural area, you can still get data shipped to you (about 64TB for 11.95). Of course if you are paying $200 /mo for your cell phone, it's probably too late for you. Just sign up for Obama care. It's designed for people that can't learn to do anything for themselves and are to lazy to try.
The free market should reign, not incompetent governments. It is a simple fact that every market where private internet services are allowed without government interference have the best service and the lowest price. ABSOLUTE. FACT.
educate yourself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
then form an opinion
do you honestly believe that if government wasn't there the big guys would fade away? with weak government, the power vacuum is filled even more by plutocrats. they *want* a weak government. without government you think monopolies don't or won't exist? less government means less *regulation*, they gobble up more, you get less choice buddy. and you get less legal recourse from being shafted
what you want, if you follow through on the coherent thought, is less corruption, not a weaker government that is even yet more beholden to money. not possible? study the laws on corruption in the nordic countries, you know, those evil socialist horrors that are actually richer, happier, and more upwardly mobile meritocracies than the usa pretends it is, but is rapidly losing with a shrinking middle class and corrupt congresswhores beholden to the financial powers that less government unleashes even more
good luck kid escaping the bullshit mythology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>. . I see no reason that can't work for internet connections as well.
That is an interesting point. I'm not sure about all of the reasons one has often worked well and the hasn't. Perhaps having a board of volunteer citizens deploying a brand new $200 million technology project is different from having them oversee the maintaince of 100-year-old power lines in many ways. If a private company, such as the Edison Company, had already built a high-speed fiber network like they did the power network, and that network only needed to be maintained rather than constantly upgraded we might see more similar results .
As mentioned in the story you linked to, they had AAA in 2013. Two months after that story, they were downgraded due to the excessive debt load for the municipal fiber, which isn't fiscally sound.
But they can be effectively exclusive, if the cost to build out is too high or an existing franchisee or operator makes it difficult to share resources. In my town, the simple answer is that one carrier was here first, which means a competing carrier would have to rely on revenue from customers who switch in order to justify a complete build-out. Not a great gamble, no big bucks here, particularly in the short term, so they don't bother, and we suffer under an effective monopoly.
I mean, if someone's willing to set up a competing service for free, there's no exclusivity rule to stop them. But I'm not holding my breath.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
What if state or municipalities built their own cell phone network in the 1990s or in 2005? Wouldn't it be crap today?
And we are talking about wired internet here mostly, is that how it works in the future? I don't think so.
Wireless is the future, the same way that phones, while not replacing the desktop entirely, are your computer "on the road" and for a fair percentage of people their only "computer".
And wouldn't municipality internet be a patchwork quilt with varying degrees of quality, just like the patchwork quilt of laws that are in the way and blocking this idea?
I do not see this working out. There may and will be a few bright spots, but those will be the exceptions.
This is a "the grass is greener" wish because companies like Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are terrible -- but it does not mean municipalities would be any good at it whatsoever.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Florida: All projects are required to be profitable within four years, which rarely happens for any broadband network—even in the private sector. A special ad valorem tax, unique among infrastructure projects, is imposed on pubic broadband efforts.
I swear there are other things on the internet besides porn. Aren't there?
So many errors in this story, and I know Florida has been referred to as "America's wang", but, come on, don't call their broadband efforts pubic! That was enough for me.
Today, the evilz socialistically guvmint want's to install public broadband? NO no NO! you goddamned commie! Thatz takin away money form the free market!"
But they don't think there is enough profit, or something, so "NO broadband for you! Fucking ignorant commies anyhow.
The similarites are kinda cute.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Suddenlink provides good service and has happy customers. Explain why it should be illegal to offer their better service to people who currently suffer Comcast.
I didn't say it should be illegal for politicians to run ISPs. I said it's silly to think that ONLY politicians can run ISPs.
Suddenlink provides good service and has happy customers. Explain why it should be illegal for them to offer their better service to people who currently suffer Comcast. Take your time, I'll wait.
I didn't say it should be illegal for politicians to run ISPs. I said it's silly to think that ONLY politicians can run ISPs.
After finding that wonderful article on rent seeking (although you still don't seem to understand that "rent seeking" is a failure of government, not markets), I suggest you look up the articles on "regulatory capture" and "public choice theory". More regulation is the primary mechanism by which "plutocrats" engage in rent seeking and create monopolies, and politicians and government employees invariably support them in that effort, not because they are bad people (most of them are quite well meaning), but because that's the way such systems function.
Government is responsible for creating artificial monopolies. So, "without government" there wouldn't be any artificial monopolies. Would we be dragged into a quagmire of natural monopolies if government got completely out of the business of regulating markets? Nobody knows for certain because it has never been tried, but given what we know, it seems very unlikely.
Take it from an ex-northern European: you don't know what you're talking about. I suggest you read "The Almost Nearly Perfect People" by Booth. Northern Europe is neither socialist, nor a meritocracy, nor particularly successful. And even if it were any of those things, we couldn't implement the Nordic model in the US.
Are you sure you understand the proposal? It's meant to _allow_ municipalities to build and maintain their own fiber networks. It does not mandate that nor does it outlaw private ISPs.
That's an interesting proposition, although it would need some analysis to understand exactly what it means and its consequences. Maybe someone's done it already.
Some of the elements of monopoly are certainly present, since a city has a non-contestable hold over territory and the geographical placement of everything within it. City systems have an immense amount of inertia, and changing major physical systems is nearly impossible except over generations. As a result, any incumbent is there for the long term.
If you combine that limited opportunity for change with overt corruption by giving companies monopolistic control over some of those systems (cable being the poster child), it's easy to see that "cities as monopolies" is not only a possibility but an actuality. One can't blame just the greedy corporations for it when local government openly colludes with them to grow such monopolies instead of resisting this on principle.
It's a failure of political duty and responsibility, as well as of foresight.
The article lists places that prohibit cities from competing with Comcast. I asked for a list of places that prohibit ANYONE from competing with Comcast, because Wave and CenturyLink do a good job. I said it's silly to pretend that the choice is between Comcast or politicians. You and others started arguing with me. Maybe you forgot to read my post before arguing with it?,
In lots of places there is NOBODY competing with Comcast, except perhaps for crappy ASDL providers. Lots of such areas, I live in such a place in Oakland (ZIP 94619).
Then there are sparsely populated areas where it simply makes no sense to build several competing networks.
Do you have a link to whatever source you're interpreting in that way? Their latest annual financial statement shows them as being $200 million in the hole, and that's after the Obama administration gave them $200 million in tax apayer money collected from other states.
That is a gray area of sorts.
If I were to identify something I am not happy with, it is the government approving all these mergers so we are in a situation with few providers.
The government got "us" into this situation by bad practices, I don't see more bad ideas getting us out of the situation --- it is passing the buck.
But I did misinterpret what you were advocating.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Within the city limits of Oakland, it is effectively illegal to compete with Comcast, because the city council granted Comcast a franchise. This city document discusses the fees that Comcast pays for exclusivity protection.
http://clerkwebsvr1.oaklandnet...
Outside the city limits, the Almeda County Franchise Authority sets the rules, negotiating fees (and campaign contributions) for exclusive franchises. Grande Communications isn't there building a state-of-the-art fiber network because they aren't allowed to. Do you think that's a good thing? Are you glad that Comcast is your only choice?
* in some areas, it's illegal for anyone but Comcast to run fiber or coax, but not technically illegal to offer internet service, if you can do it without running any fiber.
BTW, factoring in your position, as I currently understand it, here's what Oakland has now:
Unlike ie metro Austin, with five companies competing, the City of Oakland council decided to grant Comcast a monopoly, in exchange for Comcast paying them.
Comcast sucks, really bad.
You, an Oakland resident, are unhappy with the situation.
I know! Let's put the same people who CAUSED the problem (the city) in charge of building a new $200 million network, with money they take from you by force! That'll solve it for sure!
No, it's perfectly possible to build a fiber network in Oakland. There aren't many undertakers, though.
Comcast only has exclusive cable franchise that it got for network upgrade and which has expired 2 years ago. And you're incoherent, I want the CITY itself to build AND OWN a fiber network. It's NOT possible right now because of California regulations. Are you perhaps paid to not understand this?
Citations?
Do you have any proof to this conspiracy theory?
Actually, no, they are pretty bad it — and the bigger the city, the worse they are.
The would-be merger has no relevance to the situation — thanks to the previous governmental idiocy of allowing monopolies in cable TV, the two companies do not serve the same markets anywhere in the nation.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm not sure what undertakers have to with it, but I see I did understand you correctly. The CITY decided to force you to use Comcast, so you've decided the CITY is a bunch of geniuses who will do everything right, and you want the CITY to borrow money in your name so that the CITY can contract for a network to be built, just like they contracted for Comcast to provide service. You do realize the city doesn't make fiber optic cables, or routers, or even know how to terminate a fiber, right? They'll contract everything out to the campaign contributor^H^H^H^H^HH^H^H^H^H lowest bidder just like the contract they did with Comcast.
You STILL haven't explained to me why you think it should be illegal for a company with low prices and high customer satisfaction ratings to come give you the same great service my neighbors and I enjoy. We like our internet. Why should it be illegal for you to get the same great service we get? It's really not a complicated question.
Translation: The free market can do everything and do it perfectly; until it doesn't but that isn't the fault of venerated capitalist entrepreneurs. Still, letting big government fill the gap is evil. They're really arguing that the consumer must lose (goods and opportunity) when the free market fails to be perfect.
I just read the reviews: Apart from a passage on their banking laws, it seems the author is criticizing cultural norms. I am certain that the Scandinavian bloc aren't the only country with this zeitgeist. The social behaviours mentioned bring Germany and Japan to mind.
An unsupported conclusion. Slashdot frequently admires Northern Europe for balancing the socialist tax bill against employee productivity to create economic growth and quality of life balance. What do you know that we don't?
Another unsupported conclusion. I can think of several reasons why the political landscape won't change in the USA. Which reason do you think is most incompatible with the Nordic model?
Which reason do you think is most incompatible with the Nordic model?
Niggers.
>.
The municipality had NO CHOICE but to give Comcast a franchise in exchange for network upgrade. I read the minutes in archives.
Can you by chance grab that link from your history? It seems odd that the council had NO CHOICE but to have Comcast pay them. You understand Comcast pays them for the privilege. It would also mark the first time I know of that Comcast was willing to pay for a territory that Frontier, CenturyLink, etc wouldn't build out for free.
>. . I have NO OBJECTION at all to multiple ISPs providing a competitive high-class service. It's great when they are available. Yet in most parts
Then I'm not sure why you jumped in this thread arguing vehemently against my request to know which major cities ban competitors. I'm also not sure why you remained after I carefully explained to you three times that I have no probl em with a city trying it, if that's what residents want, and if they don't ban good companies from competing with the city.
In Chattanooga, for example, the municipality originally charged $350 / month. When asked how they determined that rate, the chairman replied "because we can". No market studies, no break-even analysis, just screw over the citizens "because we can". That attitude combined with a ban on reasonably priced competitors isn't good for the citizen.
You're factually mistaken about "in most parts". The fact is, by far the majority of Americans live in areas with franchise laws barring competition, by a large margin. The areas where competition is allowed are a small minority. Some parts of metro Austin represent one of the few areas where competition is allowed, and there you have up to five companies to choose from, resulting in gigabit service for $70.
I'm not sure why you're struggling so hard to convince yourself you have to choose between the crap you have now and the kind of crap decisions we could expect from your lovely city council. Is gigabit for $70 really that bad that you have to fight so hard arguing against it? If you can't provide that link and it turns out you completely made up the bit about Frontier not being interested that's just something I can't understand. There is a way that works, really well, today. People in other cities don't have to put up with Comcast, or with a city network that's been contracted out Time Warner. Why you refuse to acknowledge that I just don't understand. Seems masochistic to me.
http://www.verisi.com/resource...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ch...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'll search for it later, but when Chattanooga announced that they paid off all of their debt, they reduced the 1gb package from $300 to $70. All of the tech sites covered this in exact detail and showed exactly how they got funded, how they paid stuff back, etc.
Internet access should be free to everyone...
I'd love to see that link, because the documentation I've seen says they had 34 subscribers at $350 each. That's $11,900/month in revenue, or $143,000 per year. I'm not sure how you pay off $250,000,000 in debt using $143,000 in revenue. The interest alone was more than their revenue.
I _think_ what you may be remembering is they calculated that y dropping it to $70/month, they projected that could get 30% of the market, which would allow them to keep up with their interest payments rather than continuing to be a drain on the taxpayer. I think that's the distinction - planning to keep up with the interest vs having the whole debt paid off.
According to the map, key Democrat states such as CA, FL, and MI are restricted. Which only supports my belief that in the US, we need a new political party. Dummycrats and Repulsicans are the same party.
Citizens: Well, internet is better and now I have more choices.
Politicians: Death panels! Terroist fistbumps! Benghazi!
Obama: Internet access is the right of every American. If you don't buy an approved Internet Access Plan from the state exchange, say hello to my little frenz at the IRS.
Makes you chuckle doesn't it. This is outrageous how much trash these mega companies have had passed for Laws in states. I hope they are all invalidated and have to suck it.
> I'm not aware of any municipality where ONLY the government is PERMITTED to run an ISP.
I can't name one off the top of my head that currently still has that law. I can say that when Chatanooga was charging $350 / month for their government run service, they had a strong incentive to keep out competitors offering a similar service for $100.
> if the politicians tried to make it difficult for them (and why would they? they can't legally profit from it)
Here are three reasons:
City council members spend much of their time dealing with the city budget. Anything which threatens a revenue stream makes their job much harder. Ie, any customers who get service from Frontier are not sending that money through Council's hands, where they can direct it according to their wishes.
If a politician, whom we shall call Bob, campaigns on the promise of delivering municipal internet, they spend gobs of your taxpayer money, then the project completely fails because nobody signs up (due to the $350/month price), that's very bad for Bob politically.
The way a politician avoids getting fired is by getting re-elected. They get re-elected largely based on campaign funding. Therefore, a primary concern is campaign funding. The guy they put in charge of the muni network contributes to their campaign, the contractors who operate the network contribute to their campaign - anybody who benefits from the politician's ISP project is probably contributing to their campaign. If the ISP project goes away, those campaign contributions go away. it would be illegal if the politician explicitly stated ahead of time "if you contribute to my campaign, I'll nominate you to run the ISP". Sometimes that happens. More often, politician puts his friend in charge of the enterprise, then later that same friend donates $5,000 to his campaign. Nothing illegal about that.
Would we be dragged into a quagmire of natural monopolies if government got completely out of the business of regulating markets?
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Stefan Axelsson
>. You can have a crappy 1Mbit connection with mandatory anal rape from your friendly nice multinational corporation.
I've told you a few times now, we get gigabit for $70 / month. Most providers aren't Comcast. I'm not sure if you're the densest person to ever visit Slashdot, or if you're the contractor making millions on the muni deal. Or maybe you just ate too many mushrooms while reading your communist propaganda and now your brain is utterly fried.
And the place where I live gets Comcast cable or AT&T ADSL. I don't have any choice in that, and there is no franchise agreement at this time. So what's your advice?
Thanks for that quote. It doesn't surprise me that they have a lot of customers now, at $70/month. At $350 or $300 each month, that's a much tougher sell
where is the link
In most cases, public utilities have a much lower cost structure than private enterprise.
Citations?
I've worked in the power utility industry for years. As a direct employee for a (now defunct) investor owned utility, PSE. And I have done some consulting for some neigboring utilities. I do know that Seattle City Light and Snohomish County PUDs' operations costs were lower than PSE's back when my company had itw own maintenance crews. Now that they subcontract all of that work out, their costs have skyrocketed to about double the rates of the public entities. This is partly why they went under as a publicly traded company and are essentially being kept on financial life support by owners who also sell them services (those services not being subject to utilities commission review as their direct crews were).
Nobody (in private business) likes to maintain infrastructure, keep the snow plowed and potholes fixed. But that's what municipalities are good for.
Actually, no, they are pretty bad it - and the bigger the city, the worse they are.
Citations?
Have gnu, will travel.
No, I don't keep using the word "natural monopoly" other than to tell people that the concept is bullshit. Nobody has ever demonstrated the existence of a permanent natural monopoly in anything.
The first two links cook up an arbitrary measure of "prosperity":
For the NYTimes article, note that even according to their numbers, the US lead in terms of median income is mainly shrinking relative to Norway and Canada, two countries with small populations and huge natural resources.
Other parts of the NYTimes article are just bogus comparisons. For example, "the poor" in Europe may nominally earn more than their US counterparts, but they still end up being economically far worse off after you account for non-income transfers.
I have looked into these various claims and studies over the years, and I can assure you they are bullshit, mostly created by people who are desperately trying to match economic data to their political prejudices.
But whether Europeans are doing better or worse than Americans isn't even the issue. The real issue is that Europe clearly does what you want, namely redistribute income; in particular, it redistributes income from people who make above average contributions to society to people who make below average contributions to society, and that is simply wrong.
No, I don't keep using the word "natural monopoly" other than to tell people that the concept is bullshit.
So you are of the opinion that in (for example) industries with large fixed investments such as water distribution, electrical distribution etc. that the most efficient use of resources would be to have multiple companies competing for the same customers? That is, that there would naturally develop a situation where multiple companies would lay roads, or water/sewage lines, or electrical lines to your house, and that that would lead to a more efficient use of resources? (E.g. lower total cost for the system(s), lower cost of providing the service, and lower prices for the consumers?)
Nobody has ever demonstrated the existence of a permanent natural monopoly in anything.
Just a cursory googling for example brought up: Are Municipal Electricity Distribution Utilities Natural Monopolies?, Massimo Filippini, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics Volume 69, Issue 2, pages 157â"174, June 1998, DOI: 10.1111/1467-8292.00077. Which points to that quite nicely. I.e. both natural monopoly and "permanent", i.e. have been so for a long time. (Of course any human endeavour isn't "permanent"). (Sorry, can't help you with full text access, you'll have to use your own library.)
Stefan Axelsson
So, you offer a single anecdote — whatever its merits — to back up the claim that started with "In most cases ...".
I've seen more cases of well-cleaned private parking lots next to snow-boggled public streets than that.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The fact that your paper from 1998 even still asks the question shows you that the question certainly wasn't settled by then, so clearly, the people who justified government monopolies based on "natural monopolies" prior to that must have lied according to the paper you yourself dragged up. (And the question hasn't been settle since either.)
Furthermore, the methodology used in that paper doesn't answer the question whether natural monopolies exist because it can only look at data generated under a highly regulatory regime rather than free market competition (and in a single country at that).
The reason these require "large fixed investments" is not because there is a "natural monopoly" it is because power companies, electric companies, and municipal providers like it that way. Through regulatory capture, they have created high costs of entry. And people like you are cheering them on in how they screw over consumers and enjoy their monopoly rents.
The fact that your paper from 1998 even still asks the question shows you that the question certainly wasn't settled by then
Hardly. There are still papers published on Darwin's theory of evolution, how it applies in different situations, addressing paradoxes arising from the theory etc. This doesn't mean that the issue wasn't "settled" long ago.
The reason these require "large fixed investments" is not because there is a "natural monopoly" it is because power companies, electric companies, and municipal providers like it that way.
So the price of building roads, erecting power poles, and building a power station are artificially raised due to regulatory capture by how much? It's not like there aren't private roads, and it's not like they're built cheaper, in fact they cost as much as building a road anywhere.
And when it comes to screwing over customers, how come my Internet fibre in Sweden cost so much less being provided by a municipal company (no subsidies I might add), than anywhere in the US where it's almost exclusively provided by private entities? How is that even possible?
Stefan Axelsson
The paper isn't "on" the theory of natural monopolies, it is a paper that asks the question if utilities are natural monopolies. Obviously, that question isn't settled. And I'm only pointing that out only because you don't seem to understand the content of the paper, which fails to demonstrate the existence of natural monopolies, which is what you originally cited it for.
Manifold.
Well, you pay EU 250 / year for the privilege of owning an Internet-connected PC and 57% income tax, 0.75% real estate tax, and 25% sales tax. And even that pales in comparison to the taxation implicit in the opportunity cost from public ownership of land and resources. I think free Internet and an occasional blowjob by a government bureaucrat(te) is the least the Swedish government should provide for that kind of money!
I'm sure that kind of deal appeals to you, but personally I prefer to pay for my Internet and my blowjobs out of my own pocket: not only is it a lot cheaper, I can also actually choose the provider or whether I want the service at all.