Bill Would Reverse Bans On Municipal Broadband 157
Yuppie writes "A bill introduced to the House this week would overturn bans that currently exist in several states that forbid cities and towns building and deploying their own broadband networks. The big telecoms may not be be too happy about the bill, however: 'The telecoms have historically argued that municipalities that own and operate — or even build and lease — broadband networks could give themselves preferential treatment. The Act anticipates that argument with a section on "competition neutrality." Public providers would be banned from giving themselves any "regulatory preference," which should create a level playing field for all broadband providers. Municipalities interested in getting into the broadband business would also have to solicit feedback from the private sector on planned deployments.' The full text of the bill (pdf) is available from Rep. Boucher's website."
preferential treatment (Score:5, Insightful)
how the FUCK is that any different to what telecoms do NOW? i bet at&t give themselfs preferential treatment on lines they install to. what a bunch of 2 faced cockheads.
Re:preferential treatment (Score:4, Insightful)
Screw this (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Screw this (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually, ATT had a GREAT rep (Score:2)
As to the 100% uptime, we are nowhere near as good as it use to be. In particular, when a
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I attribute that to the disposable nature of our mobile phones. If you have a crappy mic or a crappy speaker you feel the need to shout. If a company were to market a phone on it's superior audio properties, and the phone sold well then we might see a change in this behaviour. But phones are marketed on their slick new look and fancy new options, and the phone companies are all too happy to attribu
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I pay $55 for my 10MB/s RR bandwidth BUT I am required to pay $25 for 22 channels of Cable TV before they'd sell me the broadband connection. Total bill: $70. The TV stinks. After 11PM most of the channels have infomercials all night. During the day it is Judge Stupid, or 20-30 year old game or quiz shows. About the only good stuff on those 22 channels are PBS, CNN, and two CSPAN channels.
About fifteen years ago cities, towns and villages in the USA began building their own fiber optic ne
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So the customer is essentially the municipality? And the proposed law essentially says they're not allowed to do things for themself at any amount of cost that is better than getting someone else to do it? Even though there would inherently be less cost as there's no profit skimming overhead? Is that right?
I suppose it's better than the existing law if that just says you can't do anything for yourself.
What's the difference? (Score:2)
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That's a weak argument. The government is the sovereign power, and as such must use its power responsibly. If a policy's bad, telling people they don't have to live in an area run by that government isn't a particularly practical solution; the onus is on the government to do a good job, not on the governed to shop around jurisdictions.
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If a policy's bad, telling people they don't have to live in an area run by that government isn't a particularly practical solution
That's not in question. What I'm objecting to is the blanket statement about taxes in general, which is what Colin Smith (the OP) was getting at.
He didn't seem to think municipal WiFi is bad, but that being forced to pay for it (taxes) is, regardless of the quality or merits of the project.
Whenever a corporation does something evil (to their customer, or to their employees) the standard libertarian response is, "no one's forcing you to (shop|work) there," so this should be an argument they'd understand.
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Bill Would Reverse Bans on Municipal Broadband (Score:2)
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Commie! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't they know that that's SOCIALISM? And SOCIALISM is not just automatically bad, but Anti-American(TM) even when its not.
what type of "regulatory preference"? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:what type of "regulatory preference"? (Score:4, Informative)
The rationale behind this kind of regulation is that communication is vital economic infrastructure, and the flat rate fees make the country as a whole more competitive. When the post office was in charge of telecommunications, they were required to connect a certain percentage of the population each year. A private telecoms company could have just gone after the ones that gave the biggest ROI. This is happening now; you have a lot more options for broadband in Central London, where the population is densest, than in many other areas.
Cherry Picking.... (Score:2)
Most telcom/broadband suppliers do this in the US. RCN's entire business plan was built around it. The US population is scattered in such a way that close to 75% of the population lives in just 20% of the landmass (Boston - DC & Seattle - LA corridors). One of the biggest things the telcos are fighting is that the municipalities are trying to require that they don't cherry pick who gets the service. AT&T has gone after several Illinois municipalities that are caught between regulations saying they h
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"But that's not fair!" scream the telcos.
Right. It's the law. It's not meant to be fair.
Sounds like... (Score:2)
Not just big telecoms (Score:5, Insightful)
I really have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, it'd be nice to actually get something cool like this for my tax dollars. On the other, I definitely don't want to see my city out-compete our wonderful local ISPs. If/when they became the only game in down, what's their incentive to maintain the networks? Will Joe Cityadmin give a rat's butt if I call to complain about an outage? And above all else, do I really want the government (even the friendly local variety) being my gateway to the Internet? I have nightmares of hearing a prosecuting attorney saying something like "our city access records indicate you posted anti-government statements to a communist website called Dotslash." Maybe that's unlikely, but tell me honestly you can't hear a mayor explaining how his city's network will be "a safe place for our children to play thanks to our new monitoring and filtering system" to thunderous applause. If there's a vibrant ecosystem of private competition in an area, great. If not...
Help me out here. Do I root for the cities to undercut big telco (whom I customarily hate on general principles), or for private enterprise to win out over the government's desire to protect me from myself?
Re:Not just big telecoms (Score:5, Insightful)
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The same thing that's their incentive to maintain all the other things local government provides
The desire to grow the tax base?
God help us all.
Fire departments, police, and roads aren't inherently competitive activities. There are some things that make a lot of sense to roll under the government roof. Telecom is extremely competitive, though, and I think that's good for us.
Let me illustrate another facet: my local government is currently trying to force us to approve a bond issue to pay for a new water park that no one really seems to want. They're doing this by deliberately allowing the m
Mod Parent Funny (Score:2, Funny)
You owe me a new keyboard.
MartRe:Not just big telecoms (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely. I really get tired of the unquestioned assumption that businesses will be more responsive to their customers than governments will to their citizens. The fact of the matter is, once a business gets over a certain size -- and the big telcos definitely fit into this category -- they don't give a shit what Joe Consumer thinks, because they don't have to. They're omnipresent, and if one or ten or a thousand customers get tired of their lousy service, tough; they'll never notice the losses, and the customers either have no choice (as is usually the case with telcos, of course) or the "choice" of dealing with some other megacorporation that's just as bad (as is the case with cell phone companies.) Personally, I'd expect a lot better service from a city-owned ISP than from some Not-So-Baby-Bell that's headquartered halfway across the country and has most of its employees halfway around the world, and makes more money in a week than my city council spends in a year.
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So I take it you've never dealt with the IRS, DMV, EPA, or most other government agencies that people have deal with on a regular basis. Even ATT is more customer oriented, and it's just about the worst the private sector has to offer.
"Personally, I'd expect a lot better service from a city-owned ISP than from some Not-So-Baby-Bell that's headquartered halfwa
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I have dealt with the first two plus the USDA, and while their policies may be completely bonkers, I have never received rude or condescending service, and have been able to receive meaningful follow-through with my concerns. Cingular... er... AT&T, on the other hand, has been pretty consistently awful.
Sigh! Sometimes it seems tradition. (Score:2)
So. Essentially the same citizenry, but one out of, say 10 (local is hard to be specific about) local cities is corrupt. People get upset with one government and "throw the rascals out". Makes no differe
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So I take it you've never dealt with the IRS, DMV, EPA, or most other government agencies that people have deal with on a regular basis.... Well, that's probably because you don't have a lot of experience dealing with underfunded, understaffed, municipal services.
I like how you disingenuously list huge federal/state bureaucracies which have the same size/distance problems the OP cited for large telecom megacorps in a discussion about municipal government. I live in Los Angles, which has as disgustingly bloated and stupid a city government as you'll find anywhere, and still they run rings around Veterans Affairs, Social Security, and the IRS. Even with the city department of Building and Safety, which has a terrible reputation for sloth and ineptitude, I've been abl
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No, I deal with them all the time, like everybody else. Well, okay, not the EPA, since I'm not really involved in anything that falls under their jurisdiction -- unless you count separating my garbage for recycling, which, BTW, where I live (Minneapolis) is a service provided by the city, and functions quite smoothly. We have three garbage cans instead of one; we separate
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Yes, like they've done such a good job maintaining bridges [myway.com]. It is not like they have anything more importan [myway.com]
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Bridges, for instance. (Score:2)
The same thing that's their incentive to maintain all the other things local government provides
The reason the politicians want to provide you with WiFI is because it will buy your vote. In 5 years when the technology is outdated and expensive to maintain, it will be an entirely different matter where it's simply another cost to the taxpayer whether they want it or not.
Fire departments are a bad analogy, they are required by law to maintain a certain level of service because fire spreads.
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That's the worst "that's a bad analogy" I've ever heard. It's a perfect analogy because you can mandate that the telco service provided by the government has minimum standards of service.
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In my experience, information also spreads, often faster than fire.
After all, fire is dependent on the availability of combustible material, which can only be used once. Information can spread at the speed of light (or electrons) through all sorts of physical media that is unaffected by the passage of information and can be immediately reused to spread more information.
Of course, one cou
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Government should be involved in everything that is a natural monopoly, either by regulating it so that it has artifically induced competition (my preferred solution), or by doing it outright. The notion that everything is better if privatized and unregulated is absolutely silly, because the worst plac
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If/when they became the only garbage collector in town, what's their incentive to maintain the waste disposal trucks?
If/when they became the only road repairer in town, what's their incentive to maintain roads?
If/when they became the only etc, etc,etc...
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So if my city was proposing something along those lines I would definitely be against it. At the same time, if a community does decide to provide broadband then t
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Private monopolistic utilities are often much harder to control, and at the very worst are criminally negligent. Con Edison in New York City is commonly cited as being an example of this, where they profit greatly, yet return almost no money back to their crumbling infrastructure.
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Personally, the Ron Paul supporter in me says that the Federal government should have no authority to tell the ISP, state, or local governments what they can or cannot do.
If the local governments wish to have their own municipal ISP then I can justify that because there is nothing in federal constitution
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If the local governments wish to have their own municipal ISP then I can justify that because there is nothing in federal constitution that would prohibit such behavior.
I totally agree with that. If this were a new federal project, I'd be pretty well apoplectic by now. I'm OK with cities deciding for themselves; if a particular region wants to be entirely free enterprise and another wants fully-funded government services, that's their right.
So yes... You can be a libertarian and still support municipal ISPs.
Here's the problem: I fully support your municipal ISP, assuming you want one. I'm not sure that I'd support having my own municipal ISP, though, and I haven't heard enough about the track records of such projects to know how th
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Should the federal government have the authority to tell state or local governments that they can't discriminate against blacks? That they must perform a trial by jury? etc...
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Yes because it is in the constitution:
XIV Amendment [wikipedia.org]
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
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Sorry. I should have added "In regards to the article and the issue it was discussing." which only includes municipal broadband.
Everything else still applies to its own little corner of legality.
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You're forgetting something: the only reason any private ISP can exist at all is because of a government-granted right of way to run cable wherever they need to, across public and private property.
For the record, there are still ISPs that don't own their own last mile. Since my DSL runs over Qwest's copper, and Qwest is unlikely to passively allow anyone to tell them they can't run copper to my door, I'm not terribly worried about that.
If the government passes some law or prosecutes someone to suppress speech (as it has before), a private ISP won't be immune to that... unless it has an army to defend itself with.
The difference is the legal route should the city decide to enforce filtering:
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If/when they became the only game in down, what's their incentive to maintain the networks?
I work as a locksmith for the second largest school district in the country. For lock repairs and installations, we are the "only game in town" for 1200+ schools. We do a good job because we are skilled professionals who take pride in doing our jobs well. For every story you hear about a lazy government worker who shirks his duties, there are a hundred other workers who are conscientious and diligent because that's how decent people do their jobs.
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In 1994-1997 I ran an ISP in Anchorage Alaska. ATU (Alaska Telephone Utility) provided local telephone loop service. Whenever I needed to add new phone lines, ATU was on the spot and had the lines run within a week or two. Everything was booming with my business until the city council decided to let ATU provide dial-up service. Within a few months I was suddenly unable to get new phone lines for my ISP. ATU claimed I had too many lines already. Clearly
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The significance of this is that communications companies would only need to connect to the city at one location to be accessible (salable) to everyone in the city. This would promote competition. City services should only be local...but should be available. Broadcasts of the local council meetings, etc.
That's funny (Score:2)
Well, good luck if you have an outage with Comcast. My internet line was down for two months. They kept closing the ticket claiming it was fixed. One tech came out and tried to tell me I needed lighting arrestors that he personally would install for only $300. Then they finally fixed it just as I switched to Verizon FIOS. Then they called me back and asked what it would take to switch back... I told them "A promise that it wo
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Re-election.
In my experience, one local
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Not really a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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How exactly do you expect a municipal Internet service to be paid for, if not with taxes? Or are you one of those people who expects governments to deliver services paid for by fairy dust and wishes?
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It would require an initial investment, which would have to come either from taxes, or from a private finance initiative. A compromise might be a good idea; allow local businesses and residence associations to fund some of the development in exchange for being in the first connected areas.
Then there's the matter of running costs. This could be done by selling advertising space, although I'm not a huge fan of the concept. It could also be done by offering a premium service. There are a few options for
Preferential Treatment (Score:2)
Wait, you mean municipal broadband will give preferential treatment for its own service? The one run by an elected entity, representing the people they serve? The one that won't be profit seeking (other than providing nominal tax dollars to fund other services)? The one whose pricing, serving level, and whatnot would be controlled by the citizenry at the city council level? HOLY COW BATMAN!
I don't see a SIGN UP button on the article, damn...
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Heaven Forbid.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Something else to consider is developing municipal broadband infrastructure with tax dollars, but contracting out the maintenance and management of that to a telecom.
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Federal Government. The Federal Government gave the telcos tax breaks which have totaled more than 2B/year because they claimed they would have it built out w/ everyo
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Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait a second. Are these the same telecoms that want to be able to sell "preferential treatment" at the detriment of everyone else? As a matter of fact, I think they are.
The only possible conclusion I can draw from this is as follows: it's okay for large companies to fuck people over, but governments damn well better... not. Or something.
What the telecoms need to realize is that the governments have been fucking us over for centuries, if not longer, to the point that they've nearly perfected it to a (very perverse) form of art. The telecoms can't hope to compete, though that doesn't seem to be stopping them.
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postal roads? (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand the dangers in letting the government bureaucracy develop cutting edge tech, but, if the state is always so bad with infrastructure tech, why aren't more bridges falling down every year?
joudanzuki, with reservations
Un-Constitutional? (Score:2)
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If you buy things over the Internet, they are often shipped from a different state. Thus, the Internet is used for interstate commerce. Therefore, anything connected to the Internet is interstate commerce.
When it's time to draft Constitution 2.0, that clause needs some serious rewording.
Interstate Commerce clause (Score:2)
What congress is doing with this bill is no more unconstitutional than the bills prohibiting local taxation of information services. One difference is that instead of limiting what local governements can do, the bill gives more freedom to the local governments (it allows, but does not mandate, municipal ISP's).
The best of both worlds would be where the local goverment provides the last mile connectivity and the individual is allowed
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There are a lot that of laws being written by congress that actually step on the agreement of separation between the responsibilities of state and country.
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I agree with GP. This bill looks and smells unconstitutional. Is Congress trying to give the Federal courts more work to do? I'm sure the lawsuits would start immediately.
It's a good thing (Score:2, Interesting)
Deregulated in many parts of Europe (Score:2, Informative)
Municipal broadband works well in Sweden (Score:5, Insightful)
What ever happened to state's rights? (Score:3, Interesting)
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If a state really prides itself on the telecom companies that live within it, and maybe those telecom companies would give special discounts if they were the ones providing service to a municipality, it might be perfectly reasonable for that state to enact legislation that is perceived as a "ban" here. If it benefits their local telecom,
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It doesn't even make sense that you're trying to defend the power of the people to grant corporate monopolies. How about the power of the people to decide for themselves what service they want? How about the power of the smaller towns to decide for themselves whether or not they want to organize their own broadband service as an additional option for their residents?
Why do you think more choices lead
Mixed breed (Score:2, Insightful)
Rediculas (Score:2)
Hey bob, they want to conect Bungtuck to Bumfuck, what do you think ?
Tell them it's a bad idea right after you get our crews started on it.
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Did the same thing! Ack!
Personally, I'm in favor of our Muicipal Overlords. I don't think they'll out-deliver the telcos but they'll provide reasonable, level baseline service. Right now, we live in an equivalent world of Coca Cola delivering water to our houses (at whatever prices containing whatever stimulants which make us thirsty) and the Munies trying to provide an alternative.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:4, Funny)
Huge campaign contributions anyone? (Score:2)
The big money communications interests will buy the death of this bill like they bought the death of the last one. It's coming up on campaign season so lawmakers propose excellent laws as extortion to big money interests. Even the sponsors probably have no real expectation it will pass. Everybody in congress has to have a few of these so they can wave them at the crowds as proof they went to Washington to help their constituents. Then they get their campaign money buy killing the great public spirited l
Building bridges to a better future (Score:2)
Communications infrastructure very much is an essential part of interstate commerce, government and the press. More and more people rely on the Internet exclusively for news and information. Products are ordered and paid for over the Internet. Some products are not available in any other way. Funds are transferred. Travel is arranged. Federal income taxes are paid over it, tax returns are filed on it. Many essential government services at all levels are provided on the Internet. Some places now manda
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