State Laws That Stop Cities From Installing Fast Internet

http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/

by nickreese • 12 years ago

273 59 12 years ago

briandear• 12 years ago

Do the laws prohibit private companies from installing fast internet? I don'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.)

Cities don'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 "I'll donate money to your reelection if you allow my content to have preference on the network." You also have the city having access to your usage records and they'd be nothing keeping them from using it for law enforcement purposes without a warrant or your consent. After all, you'd be using city-owned property, thus you really wouldn't have much leverage. The police would certainly leverage that. We all know that most internet traffic isn't going to be safe from NSA-types, however, there's a reasonable belief that NSA-level intercepts aren't filtering down to the local cop on the beat. Maybe it'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've ever encountered. These are the same twits that want to ban large sodas because they think they'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.

ceejayoz2• 12 years ago

Cities generally have to be at least partially in the telecom business, or there'd be five independent sets of telephone poles on every street.

ThinkingGuy• 12 years ago

In some areas customers can choose among competing providers to have their natural gas delivered through a single set of lines. I've often wondered how feasible it would be to have do something similar with Internet access: The government owns and manages of the physical network infrastructure, but users have a choice of private and/or non-profit ISPs to provide actual Internet service (ie, routing traffic in and out of the municipal network).

Obviously there are a lot of details to be worked out, but are there any significant technical reasons this couldn't be done?

dguaraglia2• 12 years ago

What happens in the US is that municipalities will sign exclusivity agreements with certain companies (Comcast, AT&T, TWC) to encourage them to lay down the infrastructure.

Imagine you are the mayor of Podunk, Arkansas and you want your constituents to have access to high speed internet. AT&T and Comcast won't rush to lay cables to your town because there's simply not enough business for them to compete for. So, as mayor of Podunk give AT&T an exclusivity agreement for 20 years in exchange for them laying down the infrastructure today.

The problem is obvious: now AT&T doesn'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.

One possible solution for this problem would be the government to build the infrastructure and then invite companies to compete for it's usage. That's what happens in UK and other countries.

rayiner7• 12 years ago

Granting exclusive franchises for cable have been illegal under federal law since 1992.

steanne2• 12 years ago

also, when AT&T wires up Podunk, they connect the government and school buildings for free.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Coincidentally, the upside to having the Post Office in the letter-delivery business. They deliver to Podunk, Arkansas where a private company could easily decide it just wasn't worthwhile.

afterburner• 12 years ago

"Cities should not be in the telecommunications business."

You state that as if it is self-evident, and yet cities have run all sorts of utilities for a long time. Internet access is fast turning into a utility.

MBlume• 12 years ago

I have a lot of sympathy for this sort of argument, but I'm starting to think it might be wrong in this case. Like it or not, the project of wiring a city for broadband is going to involve a fuckton of waiting for permission from the city government. There is no "just go do it without government interference" option -- you have to deal with the existing underground architecture, get licenses to dig, get licenses to install hardware, etc. I think at the end of the day it might be simpler to just let the city do the job than to create some huge beaurocratic interface between the city and an ISP.

SEJeff2• 12 years ago

Funny, South Korea has government managed fiber and in fact, they have some of the fastest and most pervasive broadband in the world[1]. Much more-so than the USA.

[1] http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ (check out the infographics and note the 24Mbps speeds in South Korea)

icantthinkofone2• 12 years ago

South Korea is smaller than my state of Missouri. Now let's see how fast the US can provide broadband speeds if they dumped all their resources into my state alone.

rayiner7• 12 years ago

Do the laws prohibit private companies from installing fast internet?

Effectively, yes. They can't outright ban competition, but they make it very unattractive using franchise provisions, namely build out requirements. See: http://crosscut.com/2014/03/04/business/118993/google-fiber-...

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's high-margin customers. This would have a disproportionate impact on the incumbent'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't afford it.

xenadu02• 12 years ago

We don't need "innovation", we need a reliable utility.

Here in the US my water and sewer are handled by the city. It's pretty cheap and effective. I don't need more "innovation" in my water delivery.

My electricity is delivered by a regulated monopoly provider that answers to a Public Utility Commission and has a strictly regulated profit margin; it's purchased from one of a hundred retail providers. The supposed benefits of competition haven't materialized - we're paying the same for electricity now as we did when all electricity was a single regulated monopoly on an inflation-adjusted basis, only now no private investor will pony up for capital investment projects so we keep building cheap crappy power plants. Otherwise it's the same as before and it seems to function fairly well.

Either of these would be a huge improvement and exactly what the government is best at - handling public infrastructure that is ill-suited to competition or forms a natural monopoly.

In fact I'm suffering from Verizon's "innovation" right now thanks to their refusal to upgrade peering links. They're "innovating" ways to choke traffic to seek rent/extract money on my private transactions with Netflix, Crunchyroll, and others, despite the fact that I am already paying them for use of their network (and they used my private property to lay lines to the rest of the neighborhood - something for which I am not compensated).

I do not have any choices; my neighborhood has congested capped cable from TW or Verizon's artificially congested FIOS. That's it.

Frankly when Ma Bell/ATT was broken up I firmly believe it was done in a way to serve ATT's long-interests by keeping the retail and lines in the same ILEC box. It let the (D) government appear to be "doing something", right up until the (R)s proceeded to never meet a merger they didn't like.

What we need to to break apart Verizon and ATT and turn the physical plant into a regulated delivery company (DeliveryCo) charged with running fiber to the 90% of reasonably-reachable homes in the USA. That physical infrastructure should serve us for at least 100 years - we know how to send 10Gbps/100Gbps and more down the line and the expensive part is digging up yards/streets; the boxes on either end are a pittance by comparison. I suspect it would actually serve us for 1000 years or more but it's The Future so who knows.

Let anyone who wants to start an ISP do so; DeliveryCo just drops the ISP fiber/ethernet cables at whatever datacenter you like in your city and they're responsible for backhaul/transit, billing, customer service, packages, etc. Let DeliveryCo be effectively transparent with VLANs or IP/IP encapsulation so as far as my router and my ISP's router are concerned DeliveryCo doesn't exist.

People can claim it doesn't work, but the regulators seem perfectly capable of demanding 60hz+/-@120V AC be reliably delivered to every home with guaranteed response/repair times (except in cases of emergencies). When my underground cable gave out and started arcing with the dirt they answered the phone and sent a truck within 2 hours and it was repaired within 5. If DeliveryCo's regulator said they had to deliver 1Gbps links I don't see why it would differ.

rayiner7• 12 years ago

I don't need more "innovation" in my water delivery.
In fact I'm suffering from Verizon's "innovation" right now thanks to their refusal to upgrade peering links.

Your water utility is using century old infrastructure that in many states is not in compliance with Clean Water Act standards, and in most places dumps untreated sewage into the local river when it rains. Nobody wants to invest the money into fixing things, because investment decisions are highly politicized and effectively made by a rate setting board. We're $300 billion behind in terms of investment for wastewater systems: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wastewater. The ASCE grades almost all of our water infrastructure as a "D." http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/grades

You're talking about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

rmrfrmrf• 12 years ago

The Internet is a public environment, so IMHO you'd be insane to think that 1) someone's not doing exactly what you're talking about already, and 2) that you're somehow safer with AT&T and/or Verizon. The situations you're describing are the exact reasons why people use TLS.

rodgerd• 12 years ago

Cities should not be in the telecommunications business.

Why not? If they can do it cheaper and better, they should.

Any other position is religious idiocy.

dba7dba• 12 years ago

Love this part. Love it.

"While Blackburn is clearly overlooking the success of municipal broadband provider EPB from her own state, what’s left out of the conversation is that largest percentage of funds for Blackburn’s campaign came directly from the telecommunications industry"

shimshim2• 12 years ago

I agree. This all seems so shady. I believe a municipality should have a choice, based on what the people vote for. The fact that this lady's funds are coming from telecom is a red herring to me.

logfromblammo• 12 years ago

I think you meant to say "red flag". A "red herring" is something that initially seems relevant to the issue at hand, but turns out to be unrelated.

A politician's campaign bankroll is very relevant to the issues that person chooses to champion while in office.

steanne2• 12 years ago

there's a few more states with restrictions of various sorts.

http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap

superbaconman• 12 years ago

The fear is that the government will start creating noncompetitive laws once they win the bid. I have no problem with government taking over local ISPs if they can deliver a service that's just as good without caving to gov employees when they fall behind. There must exist some shared infrastructure (or cities must allow for redundant service lines) if true competition is to emerge.

CaptainZapp• 12 years ago

To this European some American laws appear just weird and, I dare say, corrupt.

The telecom - and cable industry in the city of Zurich - yelled "bloody murder!" and foretold all sorts of doom and mayhem if the publicly owned electric utility would build a publicly financed fiber network. This happened about ten years ago.

The same companies argued that fiber is not economically viable and the investment not worthwhile.

They pored massive funds into a NO campaign for the referendum, which was accepted by the public in a landslide, twice!

After construction started the biggest telco, Swisscom, actually jumped onto the train. Now, thanks to the foresight of a public utility and the spending of public money Zurich has one of the densest, most modern, high capacity fiber networks.

Oh, the argument that a public utility smokes out poor private companies? That's not happening and that's very easy to avoid:

EWZ (the utility) does not act as an ISP. They sub lease the network to ISPs under equal and transparent conditions, who in turn sell network capacity to the consumer.

This also avoids the "censorship issue", which, in my opinion, is a spurious argument, at best.

I'm aghast about some of the arguments used in order to keep the public from pursuing its best interest.

I'd wager that a private company, whom's business model is built on force and coercion provides rotten service and will not act in the best interest of its customers.

When you look at where broadband stands in the US, compared to the rest of the world, I think my argument has merit.

mercurial• 12 years ago

Besides, as the UK demonstrates, companies will happily implement "voluntary" filtering as soon as somebody in the government starts spelling "regulation", so it makes little difference either way.

mwsherman• 12 years ago

Are these laws any more onerous than the ones the private providers must respect?

I don’t dispute that they are anti-competitive, but I wonder these are laws (or similar) are also the reason there is not private-sector competition. Would like to see original sources, and comparisons.

Remember, most cable and phone systems were designed by municipalities as monopolies, which is what got us here today. They were seen as utilities.

rdl• 12 years ago

As far as I can tell, cable systems were basically not "designed" -- it was a pretty shady industry in the early 80s, with a bunch of shoddy work, questionable ROW deals, etc. Consolidation happened and a bunch of regional carriers happened and maybe some of the later deployments were "designed", but very little of the early catv was built the way telephony was, which was itself usually different from water/sewer. Electric depended on where, and was either sketchy (in some of the East Coast cities), or some kind of "designed" system, or government (RE).

cnst• 12 years ago

...
Combined these rules force municipalities to compete with for-profit corporations, but with none of the benefits of being a municipality.
...

What an incompetent and one-sided summary of the laws! After reading all of these, point-by-point, all I am left with is the impression that these are all good laws, and are good for the fairness of the market. Why the hell should municipalities get kick-ins that are not afforded to the businesses?

Keep in mind, I came in knowing that most of these laws are very one-sided! So, to have such an effect...

Is the author getting funding from the big telco and cableco?

js2• 12 years ago

NC's law was practically written by TWC after Wilson, NC got fed up and ran its own fiber. For years Wilson had attempted to get its citizens decent broadband and TWC et al didn't want to invest in the city. So Wilson ran its own fiber. TWC didn't want to see that happen again, and after 4 years of lobbying eventually got a bill passed to ensure it wouldn't.

https://www.wilsonnc.org/living/fiberopticnetwork/greenlight...

http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/time-warner-and-embarq-ca...

waps• 12 years ago

Keep in mind that these regulations have advantages as well as disadvantages. Municipalities can easily prevent broadband providers from installing networks. So if they compete with broadband providers, they can easily abuse their position.

This can lead to worse internet availability.

E.g. these are municipalities, right, so porn filters and other forms of censorship for example are pretty much guaranteed if you let them install their own networks.

wmf• 12 years ago

these are municipalities, right, so porn filters and other forms of censorship for example are pretty much guaranteed

There are now enough real muni networks that we should have examples of this inevitable censorship by now.

otterley2• 12 years ago

But this has never happened in any municipally provided internet service to date (in fact, even municipally-funded libraries are loathe to install filters). Nor has the government-sponsored Post Office ever refused to carry indecent mails (think adult magazines and videos).

And unlike corporations, government agencies are bound by the Constitution; any attempt by a municipal Internet service to filter based on content would face a First Amendment lawsuit overnight.

mfkp• 12 years ago

From the first sentence:

over 39 million Americans have less than 2 wired broadband providers they can get broadband service from.

The logical/programmer side of me reads this as "over 39 million Americans have one wired broadband provider they can get broadband service from"

fixedd• 12 years ago

Zero is also less than two.

bostonpete• 12 years ago

Agreed -- if your logical/programmer side interprets <2 as ==1, then be careful with your code refactoring. :-)

sixothree• 12 years ago

Zero providers is also fewer than two.

State Laws That Stop Cities From Installing Fast Internet

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