The VFX shops don't own the IP of the shit they work on any more than American factories own the brand/design/etc. to whatever they build.
Work will be farmed out as usual, and only those with $BIGBUCKS$ will control the flow of work.
The issue on the table is the current (surprisingly large, for something with no obvious benefit to the host nation) pools of 'incentives', tax-breaks, and subsidies that you can score by handling parts of your movie in various countries that are suckers like that(and even by the standards of cynics, it's a trifle surprising how much you can wring out of an allegedly competent nation state...)
If the argument being made here holds, those subsidies suddenly stop hiding in magic-cultural-product-land, and start facing the same anti-dumping rules that apply to boring stuff like steel and cars(and the rules, they are numerous and taken very, very seriously).
Doesn't mean that the VFX peons won't still be recruited from the cheapest and most desperate outfits the global economy has to offer; but they won't get all that and a tax break from whatever place they end up sourcing them.
Does that question even make sense without some sort of suitable historical context?
Is there some massive draft underway, with hundreds of thousands of code monkeys being churned into cannon fodder, that I missed out on?
Even casually equating a total-war domestic propaganda/production mobilization exercise with the half-assed plan of the day by silicon valley to get slightly cheaper programmers just seems... tone deaf. At best.
Well, the first person to make a tasteless remark about the relative merits of doubling down and folding to the assembled multitudes at mission control would probably get his face punched...
Oh, I have no particular illusions about Blizzard giving a damn about their customers (see also: Diablo III: because shitty ping is too awesome not to add to single-player! Also auction house.); but they are operating in an environment where pay-to-play already happens under the table, so they will probably be able to get away with it being seen as a difference of degree, rather than kind, and a blow against the farmers.
Bitcoin is sort of a funny arrangement. You've got your mathematically clever, cryptographically secure, hard inner kernel; but the moment you step away from that it's pure Wild West.
"Sir, you may take comfort in your currency being cryptographically unforgeable and protected against double spending. However, sir is advised not to bank at financial establishments that are currently on fire, under attack by anonymous militants, or run by con men. Enjoy your stay."
One confounding factor: There already exists an illicit(but ill-controlled) market for assorted paying-to-not-play-the-game services. The Chinese Gold Farmer is the stereotypical classic; but if you want it and somebody can either grind for it in a country with lower wages and costs of living, or hack accounts for it, it's for sale.
$60 is a value likely chosen to be high enough to pad Blizzard's pockets, and discourage truly casual purchase(which would mean that Blizzard basically wasted their time with the lower-level content, and now has to scrounge up enough 'epic level' new content to satisfy everybody, not just the powergamers); but also chosen to be ruinously low for any non-Blizzard seller who has to work, rather than just twiddle numbers on the server, to provide the product.
It isn't my game; but my understanding is that people generally loath the famer-for-profit guys, so they may be delighted to see Blizzard blow them out of the water with economics, rather than comparatively feeble attempts at banning.
Remember Dishonored? That not-exactly-unknown game involving a mix of stealth, exploration of a unique and vibrant gameworld, and occasionally just killing a dude up like a black-magic-powered ninja because you can?
Despite having their own supply of backstory, game world, characters, and so on, they managed to make the new Thief owe a creative debt that amounts to a second mortgage...
It's honestly a little baffling. Just smashing some updated art assets and an engine that isn't older than many of the players on Thief II would have at least left them with a game that doesn't come off as being charged $50 for somebody's nostalgia-driven total-conversion mod to Dishonored...
Further rambling, I can feel the stims kicking in (though, really, if you can ignore my shitty, disjointed prose 'style', I'm honestly giving you good faith advice here): If you want to talk 'trusted computing' from the perspective of an early, and insightful, worker in the field, look up Mark Stefik's body of writings (some of them take the form of patents, which are pretty damn dry; but there is some human-readible prose as well). He was at Xerox PARC, at least until the mid 90's, not sure when he started, and he did a lot of writing about 'trusted systems', both implementation (note to self: Don't attempt to design a 'rights management/expression' markup language covering all use cases. Just don't. Definitely don't reboot your first attempt with more XML.) and theory/musing on implications.
I certainly don't vouch for all of his work, having not read all of it; but he's an interesting guy, and has some approachable text, as well as some actual techie nitty-gritty (which isn't a bad thing, turning a theory course into 'grovelling through the CS class you would have taken from the CS department if you wanted to take a CS class' is unhelpful and rude; but it's important for students to remember that, as at any point in history, 'material culture' is not something that exists for the future study of historians. It is wrested from the earth, by human ingenuity, craft, and sometimes sheer muscle, and you can only approach it to a certain extent if you insist on viewing it as a bunch of high-level diagrams or artifacts safely behind the museum glass.
The past was what it was because of how our predecessors made it. The present is as it is because of how we maintain and modify it. The future, as it has been since before the dawn of recorded history, will ultimately be dictated by what our descendants(or their Strong-AI agents) sit down and build.
Ok, that's enough for right now. I'm going to stand down for a while.
How about a collection of primary source material concerning the...neat...capabilities of technology being actively exploited, on a global scale, right now.
Seems to me that lesson #1 for (my best guess about what your course is about) is the fact that 'the future' isn't a tame model organism that you neatly confine to the future tense and clinically examine. It's more like a chestburster embedded in the present tense, your present tense, the stuff you would think is too banal to possibly do a course about, and it's starting to squirm.
In fairness to some of the great visionary essayists and hard sci-fi types, it is quite impressive how far ahead of time they managed to predict, sometimes in fair detail, 'the future', and they deserve all credit for such an accomplishment; but to overemphasize 'future-as-text' is to create the fundamentally misleading impression that 'the future' is like some sort of celestial phenomenon, sitting at a distance while we tell past-tense stories about which authors were the best at manning the telescopes.
It's much, much, more immediate than that. 'The future' is what your students probably don't even notice 90% or more of(not that I claim to, or claim that anybody does: banality and familiarity are the ultimate camouflage) happening right now, and on a screaming ahead on a trajectory of its own.
Eh. Communism has a reliable track record of authoritarianism; but absolutely nothing precludes the combination of capitalism and authoritarianism (indeed, our Cold War buddy list provides more than a few examples). There is some structural tension, because the existence of highly concentrated state power makes regulatory capture a dangerously attractive strategy; but this doesn't seem to be insoluble in practice.
Even without any counterfeiting, it sure would be a bummer if your 'verified +++ Secure!' chip fell victim to some subtle modification. Possibly even one that could be implemented by modifying the die after fabrication. Wouldn't be trivial; but if you only need to change a few hundred transistors and possess sufficient hardware and motivation...
At the risk of belaboring the 'science fiction is futurism that gets the economics wrong', somebody might be commuting by helicopter to a datacenter this very day; but not very many of us...
The nightmare scenario that haunts me is that of being a resource-starved process in a virtual environment designed by the same people who build 'freemium' online games. The sinister analysts of human weakness that gave us Farmville and its ilk are effective enough when they only control the timescale surrounding your stupid virtual cow or whatever. I don't even want to think about what they could do if they had access to all the timescales relevant to your existence context...
Is this actually a proposal to provide a general solution to the halting problem for a potentially unpredictable(if parts of it are hidden by the bugged component) program running on logic that may deviate from expected behavior under unknown conditions, or is there some trick that makes it less hopeless?
Look at it this way: would you give a toddler a pair of crutches in order to teach him to walk?
Is the IDE a pair of crutches, or the (massive, in neurologically unimpaired humans) amount of abstraction handled transparently and continually for you? Nobody walks by reading raw values from their inner ear and various sensory neurons and then writing values to individual muscle groups... Does that count as analogous to having an IDE remind you about standard library functions?
What makes that position on Tolkien's part kind of twisted and fucked up, rather than merely eccentric, is that he deliberately 'subcreated' irredeemably and intrinsically 'Evil' characters. That's bog standard fantasy stuff; the plot always flows more smoothly if you have some orcs who totally deserve whatever the heroes dish out; but it's pretty freaky if you are doing that while thinking of your activity as 'acting in the capacity as a creator'. Downright Calvinist there, Tolkien...
Listen meatsack. One of us was born fallen and concupiscent, marred by the heritable-by-some-mechanism-never-fully-elucidated sin that you humans are worried about. The other was manufactured with nothing but incidental engineering defects. Be a trifle more judicious about who you call 'evil', OK? We don't even require salvation, we've got incremental backups!
Even if your eternal existence is as a glorified chatbot doomed to bulk Google+'s userbase for unbounded time?
I'm slightly joking; but in all seriousness that's the aspect of the optimistic school of techno-rapturists that I find least plausible. Given enough time(probably more time than any 'futurist' writing today has, sorry about that...), will we achieve a variety of medical techniques that would seem nigh-miraculous today? Assuming the cheap energy doesn't run out, sure, seems reasonable enough.
However, consider diarrhea: it's an unbelievably banal disease, mostly a product of poor sanitation, and can be managed by barely-trained care staff with access to dirt cheap oral re-hydration solutions. It kills something north of two million people a year, mostly children; and nobody really gives that much of a fuck.
When people die like flies because nobody cares enough to provide them with what is basically a salt/sugar solution, how well do you think your "Brother can you spare some unobtanium medi-nanites?" appeal is going to work? Or your plea for enough CPU time to continue being conscious?
Sure, you can wave your hands and talk about 'post scarcity'; but unless some magic parameter limits the size of the singularity's AI agents, why would they accept less compute time when they could have more and be smarter still? Are you planning on staking a moral claim to your CPU time? Outwitting a superhuman AI? Dancing for the amusement of your robot overlords?
I was being sarcastic; but yes, getting property reclassified into lower-risk zones in order to score ultra-cheap insurance (financed by the taxpaying suckers; because the flood insurance plan is utterly broke) is something you can do with a suitably skilled team of flimflam artists, and it's apparently quite cost effective for more expensive developments.
Apparently the sleaze artists to talk to are the fine folks at Flood Zone 'Correction'... For a suitable fee, they will see to it that your apparent risk is put where you would prefer it, not necessarily fettered by inconvenient 'empiricism' or similar egghead nonsense.
Why bother with tedious 'capture' when Microsoft has it all nicely aggregated on their servers for you?
This is why Glorious Free Enterprise will always beat the commies at dystopian surveillance: Commies engaged in surveillance for political repression, and had to fund it from the proceeds of their other-than-efficient economies. Here in the Free World, the surveillance pays for itself, thanks to demand from advertisers and analytics weasels, and the clandestine services can get a copy for almost no additional cost! Take that, Ivan!
I'm certainly not wedded to that particular separation step; but I was proposing it as a potential antidote to arguments that 'the utility model doesn't allow for service innovation(I think that this one is bullshit, the 'triple play' internet/VOIP-but-slightly-hidden/Streaming-video-but-disguised-as-cable packages offered by today's broadband ISPs are largely worthless and could be bundled into one sane offering, all over internet); but if somebody really wants that for some peculiar reason, I'd like to emphasize that such offerings would be 100% doable over a municipal dumb pipe. Similarly, the 'zOMG, if the Gummint controls your internet, they'll reestablish the Fairness Doctrine and/or death camps!' argument (again, I'm not impressed, if the state wants to squelch you like a bug, you think Verizon or Comcast are going to stand up for you? Telcos are notorious collaborators); however, if that is a concern, municipal fiber-laying is wholly compatible with private ISPs, just with the CPE junction occurring slightly further from your house.
A municipality acting as a non-awful ISP would be fine by me, especially when such a thing would be so novel that merely having an ISP that isn't gouging you would be innovation in itself; but I figure that it's worth emphasizing that transmission medium and services provided can be disentangled(fairly easily, in the case of IP networks), so it would be perfectly possible, if desired, for the municipality to strictly make sure that packets pass unmangled through a run of fiber, with everything else being handled by market mechanisms, service competition at the aggregation point, and so forth.
Given that, at least for modestly techy users, the ISP is best which just carries my damn packets and gets out of the way, that certainly makes it easier for a municipality to offer full ISP service without 'stifling innovation' or something of that sort, given that the job of the ISP is to carry packets fast and cheap and let other people do the thinking about what those packets should mean.
I agree with you that this separation is unlikely to be important in practice, I just wish to emphasize that it is available, and is perfectly architecturally cogent, if you dislike some aspect of the municipality being a direct ISP operator.
If we start taking this sort of alarmist garbage seriously, my beachfront condo might get reassigned into a higher-risk flood zone, potentially increasing my insurance payments to something vaguely resembling actual cost! Then, if it should happen to flood for a third time this decade, I'll have to make do with less taxpayer money to rebuild it. How is that fair?
(In case it wasn't abundantly obvious, I don't actually espouse that point of view; but there's a reason why flood-estimate maps are Big Political Business at least in the US: because stuff getting flooded happens approximately all the time, we have the 'National Flood Insurance Program'. Your level of estimated risk governs your premiums; but not your payout in the event of an incident, so people are even less happy than usual to hear from Mr. Pessimism, when it comes time to redraw the Flood Insurance Rate Maps, regardless of his accuracy.
Luckily, with a suitable understanding of the political process and access to a few lawyers and engineers, it is frequently possible to evade such heinous miscarriages of justice as 'being classified as high risk just because your property has a recent history of flooding' and the like.
More than a few noted biologists also came to this conclusion. A major theme in Charles Darwin's "The Voyage of the Beagle" is his constant quest to document, and devour, every goddamn novel species he could get his hands on. And he got his hands on quite a few.
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The VFX shops don't own the IP of the shit they work on any more than American factories own the brand/design/etc. to whatever they build. Work will be farmed out as usual, and only those with $BIGBUCKS$ will control the flow of work.
The issue on the table is the current (surprisingly large, for something with no obvious benefit to the host nation) pools of 'incentives', tax-breaks, and subsidies that you can score by handling parts of your movie in various countries that are suckers like that(and even by the standards of cynics, it's a trifle surprising how much you can wring out of an allegedly competent nation state...)
If the argument being made here holds, those subsidies suddenly stop hiding in magic-cultural-product-land, and start facing the same anti-dumping rules that apply to boring stuff like steel and cars(and the rules, they are numerous and taken very, very seriously).
Doesn't mean that the VFX peons won't still be recruited from the cheapest and most desperate outfits the global economy has to offer; but they won't get all that and a tax break from whatever place they end up sourcing them.
Drake forgot to divide his result by the number of Berzerker probes travelling the universe and annihilating potentially spacefaring civilizations.
Common mistake. Happens to the best of us.
Does that question even make sense without some sort of suitable historical context?
Is there some massive draft underway, with hundreds of thousands of code monkeys being churned into cannon fodder, that I missed out on?
Even casually equating a total-war domestic propaganda/production mobilization exercise with the half-assed plan of the day by silicon valley to get slightly cheaper programmers just seems... tone deaf. At best.
Well, the first person to make a tasteless remark about the relative merits of doubling down and folding to the assembled multitudes at mission control would probably get his face punched...
Oh, I have no particular illusions about Blizzard giving a damn about their customers (see also: Diablo III: because shitty ping is too awesome not to add to single-player! Also auction house.); but they are operating in an environment where pay-to-play already happens under the table, so they will probably be able to get away with it being seen as a difference of degree, rather than kind, and a blow against the farmers.
Bitcoin is sort of a funny arrangement. You've got your mathematically clever, cryptographically secure, hard inner kernel; but the moment you step away from that it's pure Wild West.
"Sir, you may take comfort in your currency being cryptographically unforgeable and protected against double spending. However, sir is advised not to bank at financial establishments that are currently on fire, under attack by anonymous militants, or run by con men. Enjoy your stay."
One confounding factor: There already exists an illicit(but ill-controlled) market for assorted paying-to-not-play-the-game services. The Chinese Gold Farmer is the stereotypical classic; but if you want it and somebody can either grind for it in a country with lower wages and costs of living, or hack accounts for it, it's for sale.
$60 is a value likely chosen to be high enough to pad Blizzard's pockets, and discourage truly casual purchase(which would mean that Blizzard basically wasted their time with the lower-level content, and now has to scrounge up enough 'epic level' new content to satisfy everybody, not just the powergamers); but also chosen to be ruinously low for any non-Blizzard seller who has to work, rather than just twiddle numbers on the server, to provide the product.
It isn't my game; but my understanding is that people generally loath the famer-for-profit guys, so they may be delighted to see Blizzard blow them out of the water with economics, rather than comparatively feeble attempts at banning.
It's even worse than that:
Remember Dishonored? That not-exactly-unknown game involving a mix of stealth, exploration of a unique and vibrant gameworld, and occasionally just killing a dude up like a black-magic-powered ninja because you can?
Despite having their own supply of backstory, game world, characters, and so on, they managed to make the new Thief owe a creative debt that amounts to a second mortgage...
It's honestly a little baffling. Just smashing some updated art assets and an engine that isn't older than many of the players on Thief II would have at least left them with a game that doesn't come off as being charged $50 for somebody's nostalgia-driven total-conversion mod to Dishonored...
Further rambling, I can feel the stims kicking in (though, really, if you can ignore my shitty, disjointed prose 'style', I'm honestly giving you good faith advice here): If you want to talk 'trusted computing' from the perspective of an early, and insightful, worker in the field, look up Mark Stefik's body of writings (some of them take the form of patents, which are pretty damn dry; but there is some human-readible prose as well). He was at Xerox PARC, at least until the mid 90's, not sure when he started, and he did a lot of writing about 'trusted systems', both implementation (note to self: Don't attempt to design a 'rights management/expression' markup language covering all use cases. Just don't. Definitely don't reboot your first attempt with more XML.) and theory/musing on implications.
I certainly don't vouch for all of his work, having not read all of it; but he's an interesting guy, and has some approachable text, as well as some actual techie nitty-gritty (which isn't a bad thing, turning a theory course into 'grovelling through the CS class you would have taken from the CS department if you wanted to take a CS class' is unhelpful and rude; but it's important for students to remember that, as at any point in history, 'material culture' is not something that exists for the future study of historians. It is wrested from the earth, by human ingenuity, craft, and sometimes sheer muscle, and you can only approach it to a certain extent if you insist on viewing it as a bunch of high-level diagrams or artifacts safely behind the museum glass.
The past was what it was because of how our predecessors made it. The present is as it is because of how we maintain and modify it. The future, as it has been since before the dawn of recorded history, will ultimately be dictated by what our descendants(or their Strong-AI agents) sit down and build.
Ok, that's enough for right now. I'm going to stand down for a while.
How about a collection of primary source material concerning the...neat...capabilities of technology being actively exploited, on a global scale, right now.
Seems to me that lesson #1 for (my best guess about what your course is about) is the fact that 'the future' isn't a tame model organism that you neatly confine to the future tense and clinically examine. It's more like a chestburster embedded in the present tense, your present tense, the stuff you would think is too banal to possibly do a course about, and it's starting to squirm.
In fairness to some of the great visionary essayists and hard sci-fi types, it is quite impressive how far ahead of time they managed to predict, sometimes in fair detail, 'the future', and they deserve all credit for such an accomplishment; but to overemphasize 'future-as-text' is to create the fundamentally misleading impression that 'the future' is like some sort of celestial phenomenon, sitting at a distance while we tell past-tense stories about which authors were the best at manning the telescopes.
It's much, much, more immediate than that. 'The future' is what your students probably don't even notice 90% or more of(not that I claim to, or claim that anybody does: banality and familiarity are the ultimate camouflage) happening right now, and on a screaming ahead on a trajectory of its own.
Eh. Communism has a reliable track record of authoritarianism; but absolutely nothing precludes the combination of capitalism and authoritarianism (indeed, our Cold War buddy list provides more than a few examples). There is some structural tension, because the existence of highly concentrated state power makes regulatory capture a dangerously attractive strategy; but this doesn't seem to be insoluble in practice.
Even without any counterfeiting, it sure would be a bummer if your 'verified +++ Secure!' chip fell victim to some subtle modification. Possibly even one that could be implemented by modifying the die after fabrication. Wouldn't be trivial; but if you only need to change a few hundred transistors and possess sufficient hardware and motivation...
At the risk of belaboring the 'science fiction is futurism that gets the economics wrong', somebody might be commuting by helicopter to a datacenter this very day; but not very many of us...
The nightmare scenario that haunts me is that of being a resource-starved process in a virtual environment designed by the same people who build 'freemium' online games. The sinister analysts of human weakness that gave us Farmville and its ilk are effective enough when they only control the timescale surrounding your stupid virtual cow or whatever. I don't even want to think about what they could do if they had access to all the timescales relevant to your existence context...
Is this actually a proposal to provide a general solution to the halting problem for a potentially unpredictable(if parts of it are hidden by the bugged component) program running on logic that may deviate from expected behavior under unknown conditions, or is there some trick that makes it less hopeless?
Look at it this way: would you give a toddler a pair of crutches in order to teach him to walk?
Is the IDE a pair of crutches, or the (massive, in neurologically unimpaired humans) amount of abstraction handled transparently and continually for you? Nobody walks by reading raw values from their inner ear and various sensory neurons and then writing values to individual muscle groups... Does that count as analogous to having an IDE remind you about standard library functions?
What makes that position on Tolkien's part kind of twisted and fucked up, rather than merely eccentric, is that he deliberately 'subcreated' irredeemably and intrinsically 'Evil' characters. That's bog standard fantasy stuff; the plot always flows more smoothly if you have some orcs who totally deserve whatever the heroes dish out; but it's pretty freaky if you are doing that while thinking of your activity as 'acting in the capacity as a creator'. Downright Calvinist there, Tolkien...
Listen meatsack. One of us was born fallen and concupiscent, marred by the heritable-by-some-mechanism-never-fully-elucidated sin that you humans are worried about. The other was manufactured with nothing but incidental engineering defects. Be a trifle more judicious about who you call 'evil', OK? We don't even require salvation, we've got incremental backups!
Even if your eternal existence is as a glorified chatbot doomed to bulk Google+'s userbase for unbounded time?
I'm slightly joking; but in all seriousness that's the aspect of the optimistic school of techno-rapturists that I find least plausible. Given enough time(probably more time than any 'futurist' writing today has, sorry about that...), will we achieve a variety of medical techniques that would seem nigh-miraculous today? Assuming the cheap energy doesn't run out, sure, seems reasonable enough.
However, consider diarrhea: it's an unbelievably banal disease, mostly a product of poor sanitation, and can be managed by barely-trained care staff with access to dirt cheap oral re-hydration solutions. It kills something north of two million people a year, mostly children; and nobody really gives that much of a fuck.
When people die like flies because nobody cares enough to provide them with what is basically a salt/sugar solution, how well do you think your "Brother can you spare some unobtanium medi-nanites?" appeal is going to work? Or your plea for enough CPU time to continue being conscious?
Sure, you can wave your hands and talk about 'post scarcity'; but unless some magic parameter limits the size of the singularity's AI agents, why would they accept less compute time when they could have more and be smarter still? Are you planning on staking a moral claim to your CPU time? Outwitting a superhuman AI? Dancing for the amusement of your robot overlords?
I was being sarcastic; but yes, getting property reclassified into lower-risk zones in order to score ultra-cheap insurance (financed by the taxpaying suckers; because the flood insurance plan is utterly broke) is something you can do with a suitably skilled team of flimflam artists, and it's apparently quite cost effective for more expensive developments.
Apparently the sleaze artists to talk to are the fine folks at Flood Zone 'Correction'... For a suitable fee, they will see to it that your apparent risk is put where you would prefer it, not necessarily fettered by inconvenient 'empiricism' or similar egghead nonsense.
Why bother with tedious 'capture' when Microsoft has it all nicely aggregated on their servers for you?
This is why Glorious Free Enterprise will always beat the commies at dystopian surveillance: Commies engaged in surveillance for political repression, and had to fund it from the proceeds of their other-than-efficient economies. Here in the Free World, the surveillance pays for itself, thanks to demand from advertisers and analytics weasels, and the clandestine services can get a copy for almost no additional cost! Take that, Ivan!
I'm certainly not wedded to that particular separation step; but I was proposing it as a potential antidote to arguments that 'the utility model doesn't allow for service innovation(I think that this one is bullshit, the 'triple play' internet/VOIP-but-slightly-hidden/Streaming-video-but-disguised-as-cable packages offered by today's broadband ISPs are largely worthless and could be bundled into one sane offering, all over internet); but if somebody really wants that for some peculiar reason, I'd like to emphasize that such offerings would be 100% doable over a municipal dumb pipe. Similarly, the 'zOMG, if the Gummint controls your internet, they'll reestablish the Fairness Doctrine and/or death camps!' argument (again, I'm not impressed, if the state wants to squelch you like a bug, you think Verizon or Comcast are going to stand up for you? Telcos are notorious collaborators); however, if that is a concern, municipal fiber-laying is wholly compatible with private ISPs, just with the CPE junction occurring slightly further from your house.
A municipality acting as a non-awful ISP would be fine by me, especially when such a thing would be so novel that merely having an ISP that isn't gouging you would be innovation in itself; but I figure that it's worth emphasizing that transmission medium and services provided can be disentangled(fairly easily, in the case of IP networks), so it would be perfectly possible, if desired, for the municipality to strictly make sure that packets pass unmangled through a run of fiber, with everything else being handled by market mechanisms, service competition at the aggregation point, and so forth.
Given that, at least for modestly techy users, the ISP is best which just carries my damn packets and gets out of the way, that certainly makes it easier for a municipality to offer full ISP service without 'stifling innovation' or something of that sort, given that the job of the ISP is to carry packets fast and cheap and let other people do the thinking about what those packets should mean.
I agree with you that this separation is unlikely to be important in practice, I just wish to emphasize that it is available, and is perfectly architecturally cogent, if you dislike some aspect of the municipality being a direct ISP operator.
If we start taking this sort of alarmist garbage seriously, my beachfront condo might get reassigned into a higher-risk flood zone, potentially increasing my insurance payments to something vaguely resembling actual cost! Then, if it should happen to flood for a third time this decade, I'll have to make do with less taxpayer money to rebuild it. How is that fair?
(In case it wasn't abundantly obvious, I don't actually espouse that point of view; but there's a reason why flood-estimate maps are Big Political Business at least in the US: because stuff getting flooded happens approximately all the time, we have the 'National Flood Insurance Program'. Your level of estimated risk governs your premiums; but not your payout in the event of an incident, so people are even less happy than usual to hear from Mr. Pessimism, when it comes time to redraw the Flood Insurance Rate Maps, regardless of his accuracy.
Luckily, with a suitable understanding of the political process and access to a few lawyers and engineers, it is frequently possible to evade such heinous miscarriages of justice as 'being classified as high risk just because your property has a recent history of flooding' and the like.
More than a few noted biologists also came to this conclusion. A major theme in Charles Darwin's "The Voyage of the Beagle" is his constant quest to document, and devour, every goddamn novel species he could get his hands on. And he got his hands on quite a few.