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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.
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.
These laws have been passed because certain municipalities have been able to successfully cover the cost and maintenance of their own networks.
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.
So if you support such nonsense, WHERE in the Constitution does it grant the Federal Government the power to regulate internet providers?
Its called the "commerce clause" and even "originalist" extraordinaire Anton Scalia has no problems with that (see his concurrence in Gonzales vs Rauch).
When you can show me an Internet system that only provides service within a state, and does not transmit packets across state lines, I will believe that that one particular system (but not others generally) should be free from Federal regulation. Otherwise the power to regulate interstate commerce in the Constitution provides the authority. This was uncontroversial in the 19th Century when the Interstate Commerce Commission was created (1886) to regulate railways, and did so within states, since they carried interstate commerce.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
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.
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.
Do ghettos exist outside of cities, or do they exist because cities take wealth from financially productive run-down areas and use it to attract newer but relatively unproductive big-box stores in middle-class neighborhoods?
If the latter, it would appear that breaking up cities as if they were monopolies would prevent the flow of wealth from the poor to the rich and thereby prevent ghettos from forming.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
"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.
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
It's interstate commerce, so of course the federal government gets to regulate it. Up until it goes to the SCOTUS and the conservative appointees decide that it's time to gut th interstate commerce clause again like they did with health care.
Bottom line here is that the main purpose of the internet is interstate and intercountry commerce, relatively few people exclusively use content in the same state in which it was produced.
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.
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.