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AT&T and Comcast Finalize Court Victory Over Nashville and Google Fiber (arstechnica.com)
"AT&T and Comcast have solidified a court victory over the metro government in Nashville, Tennessee, nullifying a rule that was meant to help Google Fiber compete against the incumbent broadband providers," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The case involved Nashville's "One Touch Make Ready" ordinance that was supposed to give Google Fiber and other new ISPs faster access to utility poles. The ordinance let a single company make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself instead of having to wait for incumbent providers like AT&T and Comcast to send work crews to move their own wires. But AT&T and Comcast sued the metro government to eliminate the rule and won a preliminary victory in November when a U.S. District Court judge in Tennessee nullified the rule as it applies to poles owned by AT&T and other private parties.
The next step for AT&T and Comcast was overturning the rule as it applies to poles owned by the municipal Nashville Electric Service (NES), which owns around 80 percent of the Nashville poles. AT&T and Comcast achieved that on Friday with a new ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger. Nashville's One Touch Make Ready ordinance "is ultra vires and void or voidable as to utility poles owned by Nashville Electric Service because adoption of the Ordinance exceeded Metro Nashville's authority and violated the Metro Charter," the ruling said. Nashville is "permanently enjoined from applying the Ordinance to utility poles owned by Nashville Electric Service." The Nashville government isn't planning to appeal the decision, a spokesperson for Nashville Mayor Megan Barry told Ars today.
The next step for AT&T and Comcast was overturning the rule as it applies to poles owned by the municipal Nashville Electric Service (NES), which owns around 80 percent of the Nashville poles. AT&T and Comcast achieved that on Friday with a new ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger. Nashville's One Touch Make Ready ordinance "is ultra vires and void or voidable as to utility poles owned by Nashville Electric Service because adoption of the Ordinance exceeded Metro Nashville's authority and violated the Metro Charter," the ruling said. Nashville is "permanently enjoined from applying the Ordinance to utility poles owned by Nashville Electric Service." The Nashville government isn't planning to appeal the decision, a spokesperson for Nashville Mayor Megan Barry told Ars today.
There was only one reason it was made, and that was to explicitly aid Google. Government should not be playing favorites. And Google shouldn't be allowed to climb up poles and move everyone else's shit around with possible expensive consequences for the other players. "oops, we just knocked out AT&T service to half of Nashville. Sorry! Kthxbye" It basically allowed Google to legally declare open warfare on the incumbent operators.
I wonder how hard it would be for Nashville to use Eminent Domain to aquire all of the wires and poles then sell it all to Google or keep it if they can?
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Just because they happen to be corporations doesn't make them not traitors!
They own the courts, what the hell are we waiting for, "for the law to change" ?
AT&T and Comcast are headed by people that in any movie would have been thrown off their big expensive headquarters. Instead here we're bending over and hoping the STDs they'll stick us with are treatable. "And if you don't like it, vote for someone else" hasn't worked since the goddamn 70s.
Forget the FCC rules! This is the real problem. With real competition, filtering would not be an issue.
If google purchased Nashville Electric Service (and the contractors authorized to work on their power poles, and prioritized AT&T and Comcast installs and repairs accordingly.
The Supreme Court settled this in the 80's. The pole owner HAS to rest space to others on the poles. The local municipality can not limit the number of providers. As I recall limiting providers was like (akin?) to licensing only one newspaper for a specific area.
You have access to the poles. If the owner is providing slow support to move wires, cables, etc., then that is another matter.
The city directs Nashville Electric to perform all work on the utility poles. Nashville Electric then bills Google for the expense. The work is done properly without some fly by night contractor coming in and breaking other people's stuff.
Why didn't Google propose this? Maybe they don't want to pay Nashville Electric to hire qualified people to do the work and just wanted to have low paid contractors?
Victory over citizens, corporations are the only people and human beings are not relevant
The air is crowded enough as it is. They should be burying that fiber like they do in the rest of the civilized world.
To put it in terms we might understand, it is like if you wrote an important piece of software, then a competitor demanded the right to come in and change your software, but you still had all of the responsibility for it. If the competitor made errors and there were lawsuits, they would be held harmless and you would take the hit.
Moving pole infrastructure involves a lot of effort and great care. Cable TV amps are not just simple boxes, there are multiple runs of cable in the same strand in many places, and taps all over the place. It takes a certain amount of technology just to do the modifications and ensure everything is working again There simply will be outages.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Government should not be telling companies how they do business. Thank god for Comcast and AT&T protecting our freedom even when it is politically incorrect on failing libtard dominated sites like slashNot.
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-- The WIPO Avenger
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States and cities can build own networks. No more paper insulated wireline telco monopolies getting court protection for their monopolies.
Soon the more skilled gated communities, cities and states will have the freedom to build and extend their own networks.
No more federal NN rules directing the use of one monopoly NN ready network.
Freedom to design, connect and network all over the USA. The private sector and local people escaping federal NN rules that kept all their networks beholden to a select few federally protected telcos.
Small business and new telcos working together to find innovative network solutions that do not get told to use paper insulated wireline monopoly networks.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Just to clarify....
I own a house. I rent it to Joe and Sam. Joe piles all his furniture in front of the door so that Sam can't open it and move his stuff in.
Did the court really just rule that I can't move Joe's crap out of the way? They seriously won't let the owner of the pole choose whomever it wants to move things so that other people can utilize it?
Or am I missing something obvious?
A thought experiment...
How could a local community escape the demand to use a telco monopoly?
Dont got anywhere near the monopoly network.
Talk to the electric company (consumer, city), rail road, power company (state), water company, local businesses, private land owners.
Build a community network that spans out from different utility services, rail, power networks, land back to business and commercial real estate.
An innovative private sector cooperative initiative that brings together everyone locally but the wireline monopoly telco. Let the locals support an ISP from the back of that new private network.
Call it a network on a utility cooperative with local profits reinvested for network infrastructure. Any is ISP welcome from the same city, state, another state.
City and local gov did nothing for the existing telco monopoly to get legal about.
Some locals wanted a new network and they built it on private land that just happened to be linked by non telco private sector utilities.
What can a monopoly telco do? Block the local gov, community broadband first? Then demand a stop to the private sector in the same community second?
Thats a lot of monopoly power to enforce federally on both state, city governments and the private sector.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Corporations!
Because if the market was actually free, they’d be dead in a fucking day!
Yes, capitalism means that we can organize, and finance and build our own ISP grid too!
If we were a corporation, this would be grossly anti-competitive behavior. And if this was a free market, with that behavior, they'd be bankrupt.
Bout time the little guy won one!
Down with G!
Up with the little guy!
If you live in Nashville and use AT&T or Comcast, then this is what your bills are paying for.
Hope you are happy.
The utility can retain ownership of the poles, but the municipality can grant an easement to whomever it wants and it doesn't cost the municipality anything.
Sure does cost the municipality something (if the utility chooses to enforce its rights).
Granting an easement to someone else's property is a "taking" under the Fifth Amendment. Without the easement the utility could charge whatever it pleased for the use of a zone on its poles, refuse to grant it if they thought that was in their interest, insist the attachments occur at a convenient time and manner for them, hire their guys to do the hookup, etc.. With the easement they must let the tenant use that section of the poles at the tenant's convenience, for free or for a government-defined price. This reduces the value of the property, so the government granting the easement must pay the difference.
It's less than just taking over the poles, but it's still not free. (Just for starters it will amount to a substantial fraction of what it cost the utility to put in all those poles.)
See "partial taking" and "regulatory taking". There's a LOT of law there and a simple web search will show you far more than you'll want to read right now. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Meanwhile, everybody is distracted by "net neutrality" when it is precisely ISP competition that will keep the net neutral.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Do any millennials actually support this anymore?
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'We used it first, so we get to continue using it and you don't get to" works in the West for allocating water.
Pole space is not scarce like water in the West, so a less draconian allocation scheme than 'we got there first' should work.
But there are contracts between the city and the current providers which apparently provide rights.
They may eventually expire, but until they do,
the incumbant providers like these rights as a delaying nuisance which might kill a competitor by making deployment un-economical.
This is clearly an abuse of the reason for the rights.
It would seem to me that since a preemptive fix did not work, then the only thing to do is to start deployment and carefully document the make ready actions (and in-actions) of the incumbents. Then if it is a problem, go back to court and try to sort out the abuse from the purpose of the right. There is more at stake here than just Nashville, so it should be interesting.
Install their own poles.
Like putting up their own metro fiber and building it to take all providers. Another change, even less expensive, is to not grant exclusive franchise agreements. For example, in Maine, if I declare myself a cable provider, I automatically get access to the poles. Also if I declare myself a CLEC and meet all the requirements for being a CLEC, (which Google could do, easily), I get access to the poles.
Eminent Domain is clearly the answer. The city should buy the polls from AT&T and Comcast. They would then be free to regulate them at will.
Conclusion: The "free market" is just a political code-word for protecting existing monopolies and oligopolies against the actual free market. The consumer is fucked.
How possible would it be for the municipality to declare it was "Modernizing" their poles, and do a pole-by-pole replacement (paid for by Google, of course)? that would solve the issue of the existing renters being slow to move their equipment by giving a fixed schedule.
If the city owns 80% of the utility poles, they can pass an ordinance that says that AT&T/Comcast have 72 hours to move the lines at request, or face $100,000 fine per hour, per pole, that is not complaint. Easy.
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