<story><title>State Laws That Stop Cities From Installing Fast Internet</title><url>http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>briandear</author><text>Do the laws prohibit private companies from installing fast internet? I don&amp;#x27;t necessarily want a city government running my internet. Cities should not be in the telecommunications business. However, there SHOULD be laws promoting competition and thus restricting the de facto monopoly positions of many providers. Where I live in France, I have, in just my small town of Avignon, at least 5 high speed internet providers available -- resulting in my monthly cost for 120mbs + full cable (all the movie channels) cell phone with unlimited data, unlimited calls to over 49 countries in the world AND home phone (which I never use) for about 70 euro per month. The internet portion of that is something like 20 euro per month, the cell portion is about 15 or so (give or take 3 euro.)&lt;p&gt;Cities don&amp;#x27;t need to get in the telecoms business -- however governments do have a responsibility to promote competition. Cities getting into the internet business would be about as efficient as the Post Office getting into the letter delivery business -- a ton of public-union-related waste, bureaucratic inefficiencies as well as an inherit incentive to discourage private companies, thus reducing innovation. You also have the issue of city-run networks being subject to political pressures such as &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll donate money to your reelection if you allow my content to have preference on the network.&amp;quot; You also have the city having access to your usage records and they&amp;#x27;d be nothing keeping them from using it for law enforcement purposes without a warrant or your consent. After all, you&amp;#x27;d be using city-owned property, thus you really wouldn&amp;#x27;t have much leverage. The police would certainly leverage that. We all know that most internet traffic isn&amp;#x27;t going to be safe from NSA-types, however, there&amp;#x27;s a reasonable belief that NSA-level intercepts aren&amp;#x27;t filtering down to the local cop on the beat. Maybe it&amp;#x27;s a bit of paranoia, however based on my experiences with city governments in the US, they are some of the most power-hungry, corrupt sufferers of little-man(woman) syndrome I&amp;#x27;ve ever encountered. These are the same twits that want to ban large sodas because they think they&amp;#x27;re your daddies and mommies. Yeah, count me out. Last thing anyone needs to do is give a city (or any) government more power to do anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>&amp;gt; Do the laws prohibit private companies from installing fast internet?&lt;p&gt;Effectively, yes. They can&amp;#x27;t outright ban competition, but they make it very unattractive using franchise provisions, namely build out requirements. See: &lt;a href=&quot;http://crosscut.com/2014/03/04/business/118993/google-fiber-never-come-seattle-broadband-internet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;crosscut.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;118993&amp;#x2F;google-fiber-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unless you have unlimited capital, the most practical way to start a competitor to Comcast, etc, is one neighborhood at a time. Start at the high end, and pick off the local incumbent&amp;#x27;s high-margin customers. This would have a disproportionate impact on the incumbent&amp;#x27;s bottom line. However, in most cities, this is simply not allowed. You have to build out everywhere in order to be allowed to build out anywhere. Where I live, in Wilmington DE, more than a quarter of the city lives below the poverty line. Verizon refuses to build FiOS here, in competition with Comcast, because there is no point building $60+ per month fiber service to neighborhoods that can&amp;#x27;t afford it.</text></comment>
<story><title>State Laws That Stop Cities From Installing Fast Internet</title><url>http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>briandear</author><text>Do the laws prohibit private companies from installing fast internet? I don&amp;#x27;t necessarily want a city government running my internet. Cities should not be in the telecommunications business. However, there SHOULD be laws promoting competition and thus restricting the de facto monopoly positions of many providers. Where I live in France, I have, in just my small town of Avignon, at least 5 high speed internet providers available -- resulting in my monthly cost for 120mbs + full cable (all the movie channels) cell phone with unlimited data, unlimited calls to over 49 countries in the world AND home phone (which I never use) for about 70 euro per month. The internet portion of that is something like 20 euro per month, the cell portion is about 15 or so (give or take 3 euro.)&lt;p&gt;Cities don&amp;#x27;t need to get in the telecoms business -- however governments do have a responsibility to promote competition. Cities getting into the internet business would be about as efficient as the Post Office getting into the letter delivery business -- a ton of public-union-related waste, bureaucratic inefficiencies as well as an inherit incentive to discourage private companies, thus reducing innovation. You also have the issue of city-run networks being subject to political pressures such as &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll donate money to your reelection if you allow my content to have preference on the network.&amp;quot; You also have the city having access to your usage records and they&amp;#x27;d be nothing keeping them from using it for law enforcement purposes without a warrant or your consent. After all, you&amp;#x27;d be using city-owned property, thus you really wouldn&amp;#x27;t have much leverage. The police would certainly leverage that. We all know that most internet traffic isn&amp;#x27;t going to be safe from NSA-types, however, there&amp;#x27;s a reasonable belief that NSA-level intercepts aren&amp;#x27;t filtering down to the local cop on the beat. Maybe it&amp;#x27;s a bit of paranoia, however based on my experiences with city governments in the US, they are some of the most power-hungry, corrupt sufferers of little-man(woman) syndrome I&amp;#x27;ve ever encountered. These are the same twits that want to ban large sodas because they think they&amp;#x27;re your daddies and mommies. Yeah, count me out. Last thing anyone needs to do is give a city (or any) government more power to do anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dguaraglia</author><text>What happens in the US is that municipalities will sign exclusivity agreements with certain companies (Comcast, AT&amp;amp;T, TWC) to encourage them to lay down the infrastructure.&lt;p&gt;Imagine you are the mayor of Podunk, Arkansas and you want your constituents to have access to high speed internet. AT&amp;amp;T and Comcast won&amp;#x27;t rush to lay cables to your town because there&amp;#x27;s simply not enough business for them to compete for. So, as mayor of Podunk give AT&amp;amp;T an exclusivity agreement for 20 years in exchange for them laying down the infrastructure today.&lt;p&gt;The problem is obvious: now AT&amp;amp;T doesn&amp;#x27;t have any competition and they can do whatever they want with their prices. Your population is hostage to the exclusivity agreement for the next 20 years.&lt;p&gt;One possible solution for this problem would be the government to build the infrastructure and then invite companies to compete for it&amp;#x27;s usage. That&amp;#x27;s what happens in UK and other countries.</text></comment>