15 ms·

Municipal ISP forced to shut off fiber-to-the-home Internet after court ruling

330 points by johnhenry 10y ago

johnhenry 10y ago
Unfortunately, the idea of government assisted monopolies rarely makes it into the net neutrality debate. :.
- tn13 10y ago
  Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly but in the favor of consumer instead of provider. I don't think people who support net neutrality will be able to bring arguments in support of free market policies for ISPs.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    "Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly" It seemed to be the opposite to me. A monopoly is a single supplier that dictates everything, esp price and service. Net neutrality is more like free market where it blocks artificial restrictions to boost benefits for consumers.
    - sremani 10y ago
      The point become regulations are actually a firewall for incumbent. The more regulation you have the up-start is unlikely to enter and complete. Uber brought disruption through rough-shodding taxi regulation.
      - Spooky23 10y ago
        This story illustrates why that isn't true. The Uber story is totally different.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        Not all regulations are the same in nature or effect. The introduction of regulation that introduce restrictions on who can compete has eliminated nearly all competition and most innovation in them. Most areas have 1 or 2 providers that charge high prices for low speed and service. The regulations like net neutrality that eliminate restrictions on what users can do increase innovation in the space.
    - dv_dt 10y ago
      There used to be a consideration of monopolies that tried to hold them back from "Restraint of Trade" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint_of_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint_of_trade). The wikipedia page hints that it has been subsumed into modern "competition law" but really it feels like it's dropped away completely as a consideration. Once you sell a internet connection to a customer, it seems to feel like a restraint of trade if you start messing with the traffic of some companies but not others. Though I suppose it's not clear how this applies between state governments and cities.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        That's interesting. I'll have to think on that.
  - daeken 10y ago
    > Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly The definition of monopoly ("the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service") makes this clearly false. Net neutrality is a policy, supported by legislation that gives the FCC the power to enforce that policy. In no way is that related to monopolies.
    - russell_h 10y ago
      Right, I'm not quite how you make the leap that "Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly". It does seem to me that net neutrality makes it effectively impossible for ISPs to differentiate, because they're all compelled to sell the same product - dumb pipes. This will likely make it difficult for two ISPs to exist in the same market, but it doesn't preclude competitors from entering the market at such time as the prevailing ISP becomes abusive. In other words, it's not worse than the status quo.
      - duaneb 10y ago
        > It does seem to me that net neutrality makes it effectively impossible for ISPs to differentiate, because they're all compelled to sell the same product - dumb pipes. If ONLY they viewed themselves as a dumb pipe, I could actually shop on relevant metrics—price, availability, bandwidth, latency—and I would be happy to switch to the best available ISP in the market. As it is, it's actually very difficult to find any numbers on availability, bandwidth, and latency. Instead, I'm forced to compare prices and offerings. The offerings are actually an UPPER bound on bandwidth, rendering comparison meaningless for comparing ACTUAL bandwidth. The pricing advertised is often not for internet but some "bundle" of varied services, most of which will drastically increase in price after the first year, and only one of which (broadband internet) I actually want. For instance, I see ads for FiOS all over the damn place—successfully suckering me in, I might add—but in spite of living in residential, downtown city for the last eight years of my life I've never actually found a place I can actually get fiber. ISPs are already impossible to differentiate in terms of actual value. Selling dumb pipes can only improve.
        deleted 10y ago
  - mindslight 10y ago
    > I don't think people who support net neutrality will be able to bring arguments in support of free market policies for ISPs Au contraire. Net neutrality supports market efficiency, the same way that building a national highway system did. Incumbents want to raise their margins by decommodifying their services to confuse the market. Now, creating regulations itself is inherently anti free market (just as collecting taxes to build highways was). Perhaps in the future we'll have ISP startups competitively bonded with prospective subscribers, and private covenants assuring what types of traffic will pass (although why would subscribers choose anything other than "all", given the majority expense of a last-mile ISP is the fanout). But until that prospect is even on the horizon, it's a moot point. Any proponent of free markets, even a dedicated ancap, should support the approach that results in markets actually functioning freer.
    - utternerd 10y ago
      I love your logic, highly persuasive and I tend to agree. My only concern has been and will remain until proven otherwise, that like many things "Government", Net Neutrality while having the best of intentions will slowly be eroded by corporate interests and lobbyists. Eventually destroying it's original intent, and leaving us in a worse, or much more complicated position than when we started. Hopefully not.
      - mindslight 10y ago
        I agree, and I think pretending that incumbent ISPs have free market virtues is that erosion happening right in front of us! Personally, what I think we really need are better protocols designed to resist inspection by transit providers. The end to end principle fundamentally arose from engineering efficiency concerns, and its original implementation was never meant to be resistant to intermediate parties. But now that the industry is popular and computation has gotten cheap, the expense of a DPI box is dwarfed by the increased profit an SP can make by selling discrete "services" just like the Ma Bell good old days. Such protocols also need to be widely adopted, so that ISPs can't just block them and still retain 95% of users.
  - __jal 10y ago
    > Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly but in the favor of consumer instead of provider Can you explain how that works? Who, exactly, is the monopoly referenced in that sentence? It sounds like you mean that whatever is being referenced by the identifier "net neutrality" (guessing recent FCC decisions, but it is not clear) tilts the market towards consumers in ways that you believe are anti-free-market, but that has nothing to do with monopolies or antitrust. If that is what is meant, I completely disagree - it is the legacy telco/cable companies who need a refresher in antitrust issues. They are the only ones I see using the government to restrict competition. Putting a floor on baseline requirements offered by market participants (such as actually offering the service advertised, or not extorting cash from third-party internet ventures) has nothing to do with restricting competition, any more that mandating lead-free paints in cribs or seatbelts in cars. (Yeah, I know some people still rant about seatbelts, but not on antitrust grounds.) It has to do with constraining market participants who have already had a long history of preferential government treatment to not leveraging that into yet more ways to extract rent.
  - tn13 10y ago
    Government assisted monopoly is basically using government's coercive power to deny a party to chose from alternatives. When government forces ISPs to be "neutral" an forgo the additional revenue it essentially denying the ISPs to exercise their innovation to benefit the voters. There is no difference between government mandating net neutrality and government banning Uber to help local Taxi companies. I think people mistake net neutrality for fairness because they think a lot of people benefit.
    - zzzcpan 10y ago
      Yes, net neutrality is not fairness, it's an attempt to use more regulations to fix a problem caused by previous regulations, that monopolized the whole market.
      - tn13 10y ago
        Finally someone gets it on HN!
beached_whale 10y ago
I wonder if these municipal broadband networks can be sold to a new not for profit that does the same function
- 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
  I suspect the regulators who wrote the laws that are preventing this are wise to your idea and its the actual right of way that they are going after. The only advantage that a municipality has over a private company or not-for-profit, is a monopoly on the control of rights of ways in their geographic area. That's why municipality is can do this- private entities would have to get their permission to install a network. And it would come at high cost.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    With the right leadership, .gov has a ton of advantages. These include: - Access to fewer-strings capital with bonding. - Lower staff turnover. - Better buying power and terms than a small/mid sized company. - No taxes - No profits I used to run shared service offerings within a .gov. We almost always beat market pricing for most things. S3 and O365 are the notable exceptions.
  - CyberDildonics 10y ago
    Municipalities might be able to create bonds that have tax breaks.
- rbobby 10y ago
  If it's put up for sale there'd be nothing stopping the big players from buying it up.
michaelbuddy 10y ago
Followed by a more expensive subpar service. I typically lean towards getting governmetn out of most business, but these muni ISPs have always struck me as more grassroots democratic very american bootstrap sort of thing and commercial ISPs who fail to serve their customers exhibiting very anti-american behavior.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  If the major telco and cable companies weren't consistently the most hated companies in the country...well, these things wouldn't spring up. There wouldn't be sufficient drive among people to make it happen; it's hard to get something done in government. So, the fact that it has gotten done in a number of municipalities should be taken as a warning sign for just how poorly existing providers are doing their job. Internet is a necessity for participating in the modern economy. So, companies that provide it, particularly when they hold a monopoly or are part of a duopoly, wield a tremendous amount of power; or, maybe even worse, when they have a strong enough hold on a given region but opt not to provide broadband to some of their service area, making it nearly impossible for some rural folks to even have broadband. They've shown themselves unworthy of being trusted with such power, over and over again. It's unfortunate that legislators in NC are complicit in that abusive behavior.
  - DasIch 10y ago
    These companies are doing their job perfectly. Extracting as much money out of their assets as possible. It would be ridiculous for them to waste any money by investing into their infrastructure unless it enables them to compete better, increasing revenue and profits. They are acting in exactly the way you'd expect given how the economy is designed. The problem are the rules politicians have setup which are designed for a free market not for monopoly/duopoly situations. The only option you have here is realistically is letting local government provide internet. This way internet becomes part of the services municipalities provide and they compete with each other in being an attractive location for businesses and citizens, so they're incentivized to provide good and cheap internet. At least as cheap and good internet as other places anyway.
DasIch 10y ago
I wonder if the necessary prerequisites for a free market will ever become common knowledge. This approach of just not regulating markets in the hope that a free market magically appears seems insane to me. It is like hitting a screw with a hammer and hoping the screw turns into a nail before the hammer connects. It never happens and you'll always get a huge fucking mess everyone somehow is surprised about. Health care is the best example. The only thing unexpected and worrisome about it is that the executives at pharma companies have just now realized that they can increase prices this way. Doesn't exactly speak well for their knowledge of economics.
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
  Saw a great talk recently that explained there is no such thing as a free market. Any market needs government oversight and laws to exist. It needs government (courts) to enforce contractual obligations. It needs infrastructure to deliver goods (roads) and to run businesses (power; water; garbage; police). All successful markets have rules. The so called "free market" proponents simply lobby for the rules to be changed in such a way that those at the top make more money; they are almost never lobbying for extra actual net freedom, but just a different skew to the rules so that they can take home still more of the profits.
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    Sounds like a pro-government propaganda. Illegal market places exist and operate successfully despite breaking laws, hiding from the police and not having anyone to enforce contractual obligations.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      They tend to degrade into cartels. With the absence of courts, they do stuff like decapitate the competition.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        When only people who are willing to risk imprisonment participate in those markets, violence is to be expected, no? Extrapolating that to what would happen in an actual absence of law seems unsound.
20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
So long as there are levers of control, people will attempt to exploit them. The government at every level, should have no power to prohibit entities, whether government or not, from providing internet service. Freedom of transaction is a basic human right (whether the Bill of Rights talks about it or not, read the Preamble to the Bill of Rights and you'll see the Bill of Rights doesn't create rights, according to the Bill of Rights, it creates limitations on government from violating those rights.) Even if you disagree with the above, the First Amendment is unquestionably part of the constitution and thus this is a violation of freedom of speech (internet is speech.)
- colechristensen 10y ago
  >The government at every level, should have no power to prohibit entities, whether government or not, from providing internet service. Sure they should. You're being ridiculous. The first amendment doesn't mean anyone can do anything because you can pretty easily cast a wide net and classify everything as speech. I can't freely express myself with a firearm and shoot anybody I don't like. Likewise, governments can regulate commerce. They're generally doing a pretty bad job when it comes to the Internet in many cases, but it's very much not a first amendment issue.
  - 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
    Wow. It's ridiculous to oppose the government stopping people from getting economic broadband? And you compare it to shooting people with a fire arm? I knew that the loony left had taken over HN, but this is really around the bend. This site use to be a place where people believed in the Internet, and believed that people hat a right to communicate.
- rayiner 10y ago
  The government (the state of North Carolina) is simply choosing not to go into the Internet business. The municipality is just an organ of the state government. So it's the government telling itself what to do. Why should that not be permitted?
- 10y ago
bcheung 10y ago
One thing to point out that I think people are missing is that the ruling was that a government could not operate a business in a different jurisdiction. It has nothing to do with free market or net neutrality concerns.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  It still seems weird. I can think of many small municipalities around here that can't quite do things on their own. Sharing water, fire, police, electricity, sewer, gas, roads, busses, trains, schools, hospitals and garbage services with a larger town seems pretty reasonable. I mean, as long as it's not forced on any of the participants. The internet must be really dangerous in some way to require the special regulation. edit "Electric is provided with a contract with the City of Wilson, however Pinetops owns and maintains all distribution lines to Pinetops citizens and businesses." [1] [1] http://pinetopsnc.publishpath.com/departments http://pinetopsnc.publishpath.com/departments
  - bcheung 10y ago
    It didn't sound like that was ruled out. If the other city wanted to contract with them it would probably be possible.
    - jfoutz 10y ago
      "Wilson decided not to appeal the court decision and voted to terminate the service agreement with the town of Pinetops, Wilson's city spokesperson, Rebecca Agner, told Ars today." The agreement looks like it was between the two towns. I wonder how it's fundamentally different than electricity.
- sgnelson 10y ago
  I haven't read the ruling, so I'm talking a bit out of my ass here; however, that's rather nonsensical approach considering that many areas of the country have multi-jurisdictional systems in place for services. As an example, arguably the largest and most well known being the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but is just one of many many examples[1]. Further, these type of multi-jurisdictional systems are becoming ever more important as cities continue to grow and encompass other counties (never mind other states), and the creation of (as well determining who pays for) infrastructure becomes an ever more important issue. There could be an argument to be made that telecommunications infrastructure is a different beast than traditional mass transportation, highways, etc. However, I reject that notion out of hand as this has not been even been the first type of new infrastructure that the US has dealt with in it's history (electricity, original telecommunications (telegram/telephone) being the most obvious.) But let's not beat around the bush, the law and the ruling are nothing more than typical bought and paid for members of a different level of government (NC is not a home rule state, and the current Republican run legislature already has a long history of gross overreach into municipal matters) creating less competition so that oligopolistic entities can make a large amount of money on the backs of the public. Time Warner Cable (Spectrum now I guess) owns the NC legislature, lock stock and barrel. [1] See links for more data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_district_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_district_(United_State... and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_powers_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_powers_authority
openasocket 10y ago
It should be noted that it's not like this ISP is shutting down, it's just being barred from serving customers outside its county. This action shuts off service for about 200 people, but the ISP will continue to serve over 7,000. Still pretty bad, but not as bad as the headline makes it seem.
- themartorana 10y ago
  How are government sponsored protectionist laws like this even legal? It's very frustrating. Edit: For further context, both towns wanted the service, which makes it even more frustrating. If Wilson made its service private there'd be no issue. Can a private enterprise be government owned? I guess not? How about a tiny startup with one person operating billing and they call it a "private-public partnership"? I'm grasping at straws, I realize.
  - MR4D 10y ago
    What about a non-profit? Sort of a way around the issue. Further, everything you buy avoids sales tax, so that alone gets you an 8% cost advantage.
- pistle 10y ago
  This was a warning shot to other muni's in NC capable of adding another angle of attack against the entrenched monopolies of internet access there. If Time Warner didn't win this one, they know the cities of, and suburbs around, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Durham could start tearing away customers. Removing the context makes it seem small. The game was far larger.
  - justifier 10y ago
    exactly before realising you said 'warning shot' on my first read through of your comment i read it as 'winning shot' precedent seems to hold more value for a lawyer than the law itself is that criticism or explanation of affected legal systems?
dpark 10y ago
What stops Pinetops from forming a municipal broadband corp that simply subcontracts everything to Greenlight?
- jauer 10y ago
  This is pretty much what my town does for their public electric utility. I moved from larger town A (has an electric utility, a lot of trucks, linemen, and a yard full of transformers and cable spools) to smaller town B and noticed that while the billing address changed pretty much everything else stayed the same. Town B might have one linemen, but I see town A's people and trucks every time there is a major project and town B's substations are fed from a substation run by town A.
- thyrsus 10y ago
  Wilson established its internet service before the law went into effect, and probably paniced the monopolies into getting the law passed, since their service was so utterly superior and cheaper in cost to anything the monopolies offered. Wilson only barely managed to get grandfathered in; the law also prohibits any new government provided internet service. Example: Chapel Hill, NC was busy designing public WIFI service, but has abandoned that to the incumbent Time Warner Cable monopoly WIFI. Oh, you don't have a TWC account? Sucks to be you. My opinion: the legislature is totally corrupt. The only silver lining is that Google is (a) a "private" concern and (b) is coming to me in a few years. AT&T is also competing right now, but their "fiber" turns into ADSL a few hundred yards from the customer. The non-Research Triangle Park areas of the state are screwed until Google can provide competition. It would be far better for counties/cities to start that competition now.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    I did a tiny bit of research this evening, because this sounded so crazy. My opinion: People on the edge of wilson county should petition to redraw the county line. Eroding the tax base might scare the legislature into being a tiny bit more sane.
grahamburger 10y ago
I've spent most of my career (15+ years now) building and maintaining private regional ISPs that compete with big TelCos, with considerable success. It's surprisingly feasible to start an ISP in your garage with a few thousand dollars and grow it to a few hundred customers just by providing decent customer service and a working product. If you've ever been curious about what it takes to get started with something like that I'm happy to answer questions - here or email in my profile.
- iopuy 10y ago
  For community benefit, do you think you could give us a quick summary of the stages involved? Specifically, how does one go about leasing a connection from a larger Telco? Doesn't this normally cost 10 of thousands of dollars per month?
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    Sure! For the better part of 2015 my job was to fly in to specific markets in the US and spend 2-4 days building a plan for a wireless ISP network that would be built a few months later. I'll summarize the process that I used, perhaps that will be helpful? First I should explain that my experience is in fixed wireless networks[0] more than fiber. First, I would spend some time on Google Earth looking for good neighborhoods to serve. A good neighborhood is typically a dense suburban development with low tree growth. Then I look for potential places to put the access points to serve the area - you really need line of site (no trees) to each home to provide good service. Water tanks, mountains/hills, office buildings and even residential homes make good access point locations. Often you can negotiate a rooftop lease with a place like that for a few hundred dollars a month (or even less). You can also use commercial cell phone towers, but they're more like 1-2k/month. You really want to be able to see a few hundred rooftops within 5-10 miles of your access point location to make it worthwhile. Next you need to figure out how to get service to your access point location, like you mentioned. You really only need a few hundred mbps circuit to start though, a 1gbps circuit will last you up to a few hundred customers at least. Your first circuit shouldn't cost more than 2k to maybe 3.5k / month. The hard part is finding it in a place where you can then get it delivered to your access point location. Sometimes you get lucky and find an office building near a suburban neighborhood that already has a fiber demarc in the basement - that's a slam dunk. More often you have to lease space on an office building in the city, buy your fiber circuit there, and then use a high capacity wireless backhaul to relay the service to your access points. I would usually just drive around the main roadways looking for the orange stickered fiber whips to see where the fiber lines run, then call the company to get pricing. (can't find a photo at the moment, I'll keep looking.) Then, you just start building and signing people up. Lot's of people make the mistake of trying to go cheap on the customer install, many WISPs start by trying to install their customers with in-home radios rather than putting them on the roof. That doesn't work. Regardless of the type of equipment you use, you have to put a good radio on the roof with a reasonably high gain directional antenna pointing to your tower. The other common early pitfall is to try to use regular WiFi devices for your network. WiFi is designed to work well in buildings / office parks, not so much outside and long-ish distances. Ubiquiti equipment is a good start and very cheap, although there are better ones. The hardest part about signing up customers is paying for their equipment up front. You're looking at 250-350$ per customer installation (including amortizing infrastructure build) if you're in an area where the incumbent is really bad you can sometimes charge some of that to the customer. The ROI isn't too bad even if you eat that cost - less than a year - but it can be hard when you're starting out. The next hard part is jumping over the scaling humps. You'll need a staffed support center and NOC before you're fully able to afford it, for example. Disclaimer - this is what I'm working on know, providing a variety of the backend services that these WISPs usually need / benefit from but can't afford to build on their own. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_provider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov...
jrowley 10y ago
This seems like a fairly clean cut case of corruption. It's amazing how external money can drive legislation and political action. Why would these politicians ever try to block this on their own accord? Do they really fear a government monopoly that much? Or maybe they just love small government (with the exception of the military/military contractors, which need to be bigger of course).
- xupybd 10y ago
  I love small government. But if certain infrastructure makes more sense at a municipal level ideology should go out the window. We don't have a lot of private roads because it just doesn't make sense, the normal competition driving efficiency model falls over because the most efficient solution involves only one road per route ( over simplifying here ). I think the same maybe true with the local loop of consumer level internet connections.
  - Ericson2314 10y ago
    A big difference is that roads are (roughly) a government monopoly—reudcing competition while these municipalities are adding competition. The idea is that in poorly functioning markets the government can step in with an alternative, especially one that is obligated to at least break even in order not to stifle innovation, to restore the market. This really ought to be a bipartisan idea. I beleive the Roosevelt institute his written on this, let me find a link.
    - pitaj 10y ago
      Many would say that these markets are poorly functioning due to government interference in first place, like these very laws, for instance.
      - Ericson2314 10y ago
        Traditionally, such laissez-faire views would distinguish government constraining itself and government constraining the private sector, approving of the former and not the latter. But I'm down to look at both the same way (especially when, as I wrote, government is constrained not to indefinitely run at a loss so as to play by more similar rules). That said, I know of little historical evidence that market competitiveness restores itself in the absence of external meddling. The fact is in telecom we are coming off a history of official monopoly, competition, and then a near-reformation of the monopoly without the increased regulation to go with it. So it sure as hell looks as if we backed off the controls and market-based approaches failed. Now it could be that post-deregulation and trust-busting, there was still too much regulation, but again I don't often see laissez-faire views claiming that government entry into the marketplace must be allowed. A middle ground that I'm more receptive to is that a never-interfered-with market will always self-correct, but past interference interference may have distorted the market into an otherwise-unreachable state where self-correction is not possible. In that case we should with heavy intrusion try to force the market into a good state, and then slowly easy off the controls carefully monitoring to see if such self-correction does occur. Economic pontificating aside, with wired networks I think there is a legitimate public interest in fewer redundant wires (like roads), and too much incumbency advantage with the amount of infrastructure required, for me to put much faith in market-based approaches. Wireless networks on the other hand largely avoid those problems so I think that's a better area for them.
vpeters25 10y ago
I don't how how the actual law is written but maybe the Muni could just supply dark fiber and allow private ISPs to provide the actual broadband service.
- sitkack 10y ago
  Who is going to start a company to supply 200 people with Internet?
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Maybe people like this: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-building-its-own-gigabit-fibre-network https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bu...
plandis 10y ago
This seems almost by definition of government working for corporations over its citizens. What a sad day.
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
  Now is the time for all good hackers to come to the aid of their country
xupybd 10y ago
How is lobbying still legal in the USA? Isn't it clear as day corruption, where you pay for influence over the government? I thought Americans valued freedom?
- washadjeffmad 10y ago
  The freedom for an individual (a minority) to out-buy popular, widely held, value-backed ideas (the majority) with one's own money is about as American as it gets. What is the government's role if not to protect minorities from the will of the majority?
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  'lobbying' just means individuals or groups speaking to their government reps. There's nothing wrong with it. It's when there's a disproportionate power imbalance that we run into problems.
  - xupybd 10y ago
    Isn't there disproportionate power there now? Large amounts of money can be used to employ full time lobbyists. These full time lobbyists mean you can pay for influence that the ordinary citizen would not have the resources to achieve.
    - jomamaxx 10y ago
      Yes, there is definitely a problem. But 'lobbying' itself is not the problem.
- posterboy 10y ago
  The market will fix it
- otterley 10y ago
  > How is lobbying still legal in the USA? Lobbying is well-protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is considered "core political speech," or, alternatively protected under the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. There's an entire body of First Amendment law out there for you to study if you're particularly interested.
ams6110 10y ago
I call BS on this: The Vick Family Farms predicament was described in a recent New York Times article. The business has used Greenlight's faster Internet to support a high-tech packing plant that automatically sorts sweet potatoes by size and quality, with each spud tagged with its own bar code. “We’re very worried because there is no way we could run this equipment on the Internet service we used to have, and we can’t imagine the loss we’ll have to the business,” farm sales head Charlotte Vick said. Potato-sorting and tagging does not require internet access.
- markrages 10y ago
  Maybe they are internet-of-things potatoes which require server access for full functionality.
- monitron 10y ago
  Maybe software updates? Remote monitoring/control? Something really off the wall like sweet potato classification by cloud-based neural network computer vision?!
- Grue3 10y ago
  Yeah, but watching Youtube and Netflix to pass the time while potatoes are automatically sorted does.
lucaspiller 10y ago
> There are laws in about 20 states that restrict municipal broadband, benefiting private ISPs that often donate heavily to state legislators. I'm not that clear on how US politics and 'lobbying' works, but why don't you just call it what it is - a bribe? In this case 200 families will be back to slow speeds and poor service ISP (who no doubt will be putting their prices up) just because said ISP has enough spare cash to bribe the politicians. How is that fair?
- isubkhankulov 10y ago
  how else will politicians make decisions? corporations need to guide them on whats best for the people. /s in reality, antitrust provisions really need to kick in. even in nyc, time warner dominates and has local monopolies in many buildings.
- beagle3 10y ago
  As long as it's not "this favor for this donation", it is legal in the US and not considered a bribe. It's not even a bribe when constantly give donation but threaten to stop them if the legislator doesn't follow your wishes [0]. The DOJ was petitioned to investigate but refused to even look into it, so, (by fiat, or rather lack of it) it is legal. [0] http://www.zdnet.com/article/chris-dodd-and-the-mpaa-bribery-or-politics-as-usual/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/chris-dodd-and-the-mpaa-bribery...
- tehwebguy 10y ago
  Perhaps major news outlets could adopt a style guide to push public opinion on donations like this? * This news organization chooses to report all political donations that appear one step away from quid pro quo as "bribes" Or maybe a new word should be made up that is given a dirty connotation like "bribe" but one that keeps lawsuits further at bay.
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
"""There are laws in about 20 states that restrict municipal broadband, benefiting private ISPs that often donate heavily to state legislators. """ Aha! And all became clear.
Animats 10y ago
This shutdown increases the "economic liberty" index slightly.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12518783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12518783
duncan_bayne 10y ago
Good. The fewer coercively funded projects like these the better. To describe this as "community" broadband as some commentators do is really propaganda. Consider how absurd it'd sound if someone spoke of a "community Air Force".
AnsemWise 10y ago
I have nothing to add other than my voice of agreement about the clear corruption of these laws. What is the benefit, to the people of North Carolina, of restricting municipal ISP growth? What rights are being protected by these laws? I am disgusted by the clear disregard of the people of NC's interests, but also by the lack of action by the people themselves.

330 points by johnhenry 10y ago

johnhenry 10y ago

Unfortunately, the idea of government assisted monopolies rarely makes it into the net neutrality debate. :.

tn13 10y ago
Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly but in the favor of consumer instead of provider. I don't think people who support net neutrality will be able to bring arguments in support of free market policies for ISPs.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly" It seemed to be the opposite to me. A monopoly is a single supplier that dictates everything, esp price and service. Net neutrality is more like free market where it blocks artificial restrictions to boost benefits for consumers.
  - sremani 10y ago
    The point become regulations are actually a firewall for incumbent. The more regulation you have the up-start is unlikely to enter and complete. Uber brought disruption through rough-shodding taxi regulation.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      This story illustrates why that isn't true. The Uber story is totally different.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Not all regulations are the same in nature or effect. The introduction of regulation that introduce restrictions on who can compete has eliminated nearly all competition and most innovation in them. Most areas have 1 or 2 providers that charge high prices for low speed and service. The regulations like net neutrality that eliminate restrictions on what users can do increase innovation in the space.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    There used to be a consideration of monopolies that tried to hold them back from "Restraint of Trade" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint_of_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint_of_trade). The wikipedia page hints that it has been subsumed into modern "competition law" but really it feels like it's dropped away completely as a consideration. Once you sell a internet connection to a customer, it seems to feel like a restraint of trade if you start messing with the traffic of some companies but not others. Though I suppose it's not clear how this applies between state governments and cities.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      That's interesting. I'll have to think on that.
- daeken 10y ago
  > Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly The definition of monopoly ("the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service") makes this clearly false. Net neutrality is a policy, supported by legislation that gives the FCC the power to enforce that policy. In no way is that related to monopolies.
  - russell_h 10y ago
    Right, I'm not quite how you make the leap that "Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly". It does seem to me that net neutrality makes it effectively impossible for ISPs to differentiate, because they're all compelled to sell the same product - dumb pipes. This will likely make it difficult for two ISPs to exist in the same market, but it doesn't preclude competitors from entering the market at such time as the prevailing ISP becomes abusive. In other words, it's not worse than the status quo.
    - duaneb 10y ago
      > It does seem to me that net neutrality makes it effectively impossible for ISPs to differentiate, because they're all compelled to sell the same product - dumb pipes. If ONLY they viewed themselves as a dumb pipe, I could actually shop on relevant metrics—price, availability, bandwidth, latency—and I would be happy to switch to the best available ISP in the market. As it is, it's actually very difficult to find any numbers on availability, bandwidth, and latency. Instead, I'm forced to compare prices and offerings. The offerings are actually an UPPER bound on bandwidth, rendering comparison meaningless for comparing ACTUAL bandwidth. The pricing advertised is often not for internet but some "bundle" of varied services, most of which will drastically increase in price after the first year, and only one of which (broadband internet) I actually want. For instance, I see ads for FiOS all over the damn place—successfully suckering me in, I might add—but in spite of living in residential, downtown city for the last eight years of my life I've never actually found a place I can actually get fiber. ISPs are already impossible to differentiate in terms of actual value. Selling dumb pipes can only improve.
      - deleted 10y ago
- mindslight 10y ago
  > I don't think people who support net neutrality will be able to bring arguments in support of free market policies for ISPs Au contraire. Net neutrality supports market efficiency, the same way that building a national highway system did. Incumbents want to raise their margins by decommodifying their services to confuse the market. Now, creating regulations itself is inherently anti free market (just as collecting taxes to build highways was). Perhaps in the future we'll have ISP startups competitively bonded with prospective subscribers, and private covenants assuring what types of traffic will pass (although why would subscribers choose anything other than "all", given the majority expense of a last-mile ISP is the fanout). But until that prospect is even on the horizon, it's a moot point. Any proponent of free markets, even a dedicated ancap, should support the approach that results in markets actually functioning freer.
  - utternerd 10y ago
    I love your logic, highly persuasive and I tend to agree. My only concern has been and will remain until proven otherwise, that like many things "Government", Net Neutrality while having the best of intentions will slowly be eroded by corporate interests and lobbyists. Eventually destroying it's original intent, and leaving us in a worse, or much more complicated position than when we started. Hopefully not.
    - mindslight 10y ago
      I agree, and I think pretending that incumbent ISPs have free market virtues is that erosion happening right in front of us! Personally, what I think we really need are better protocols designed to resist inspection by transit providers. The end to end principle fundamentally arose from engineering efficiency concerns, and its original implementation was never meant to be resistant to intermediate parties. But now that the industry is popular and computation has gotten cheap, the expense of a DPI box is dwarfed by the increased profit an SP can make by selling discrete "services" just like the Ma Bell good old days. Such protocols also need to be widely adopted, so that ISPs can't just block them and still retain 95% of users.
- __jal 10y ago
  > Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly but in the favor of consumer instead of provider Can you explain how that works? Who, exactly, is the monopoly referenced in that sentence? It sounds like you mean that whatever is being referenced by the identifier "net neutrality" (guessing recent FCC decisions, but it is not clear) tilts the market towards consumers in ways that you believe are anti-free-market, but that has nothing to do with monopolies or antitrust. If that is what is meant, I completely disagree - it is the legacy telco/cable companies who need a refresher in antitrust issues. They are the only ones I see using the government to restrict competition. Putting a floor on baseline requirements offered by market participants (such as actually offering the service advertised, or not extorting cash from third-party internet ventures) has nothing to do with restricting competition, any more that mandating lead-free paints in cribs or seatbelts in cars. (Yeah, I know some people still rant about seatbelts, but not on antitrust grounds.) It has to do with constraining market participants who have already had a long history of preferential government treatment to not leveraging that into yet more ways to extract rent.
- tn13 10y ago
  Government assisted monopoly is basically using government's coercive power to deny a party to chose from alternatives. When government forces ISPs to be "neutral" an forgo the additional revenue it essentially denying the ISPs to exercise their innovation to benefit the voters. There is no difference between government mandating net neutrality and government banning Uber to help local Taxi companies. I think people mistake net neutrality for fairness because they think a lot of people benefit.
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    Yes, net neutrality is not fairness, it's an attempt to use more regulations to fix a problem caused by previous regulations, that monopolized the whole market.
    - tn13 10y ago
      Finally someone gets it on HN!

beached_whale 10y ago

I wonder if these municipal broadband networks can be sold to a new not for profit that does the same function

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
I suspect the regulators who wrote the laws that are preventing this are wise to your idea and its the actual right of way that they are going after. The only advantage that a municipality has over a private company or not-for-profit, is a monopoly on the control of rights of ways in their geographic area. That's why municipality is can do this- private entities would have to get their permission to install a network. And it would come at high cost.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  With the right leadership, .gov has a ton of advantages. These include: - Access to fewer-strings capital with bonding. - Lower staff turnover. - Better buying power and terms than a small/mid sized company. - No taxes - No profits I used to run shared service offerings within a .gov. We almost always beat market pricing for most things. S3 and O365 are the notable exceptions.
- CyberDildonics 10y ago
  Municipalities might be able to create bonds that have tax breaks.
rbobby 10y ago
If it's put up for sale there'd be nothing stopping the big players from buying it up.

michaelbuddy 10y ago

Followed by a more expensive subpar service. I typically lean towards getting governmetn out of most business, but these muni ISPs have always struck me as more grassroots democratic very american bootstrap sort of thing and commercial ISPs who fail to serve their customers exhibiting very anti-american behavior.

SwellJoe 10y ago
If the major telco and cable companies weren't consistently the most hated companies in the country...well, these things wouldn't spring up. There wouldn't be sufficient drive among people to make it happen; it's hard to get something done in government. So, the fact that it has gotten done in a number of municipalities should be taken as a warning sign for just how poorly existing providers are doing their job. Internet is a necessity for participating in the modern economy. So, companies that provide it, particularly when they hold a monopoly or are part of a duopoly, wield a tremendous amount of power; or, maybe even worse, when they have a strong enough hold on a given region but opt not to provide broadband to some of their service area, making it nearly impossible for some rural folks to even have broadband. They've shown themselves unworthy of being trusted with such power, over and over again. It's unfortunate that legislators in NC are complicit in that abusive behavior.
- DasIch 10y ago
  These companies are doing their job perfectly. Extracting as much money out of their assets as possible. It would be ridiculous for them to waste any money by investing into their infrastructure unless it enables them to compete better, increasing revenue and profits. They are acting in exactly the way you'd expect given how the economy is designed. The problem are the rules politicians have setup which are designed for a free market not for monopoly/duopoly situations. The only option you have here is realistically is letting local government provide internet. This way internet becomes part of the services municipalities provide and they compete with each other in being an attractive location for businesses and citizens, so they're incentivized to provide good and cheap internet. At least as cheap and good internet as other places anyway.

DasIch 10y ago

I wonder if the necessary prerequisites for a free market will ever become common knowledge. This approach of just not regulating markets in the hope that a free market magically appears seems insane to me. It is like hitting a screw with a hammer and hoping the screw turns into a nail before the hammer connects. It never happens and you'll always get a huge fucking mess everyone somehow is surprised about. Health care is the best example. The only thing unexpected and worrisome about it is that the executives at pharma companies have just now realized that they can increase prices this way. Doesn't exactly speak well for their knowledge of economics.

SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
Saw a great talk recently that explained there is no such thing as a free market. Any market needs government oversight and laws to exist. It needs government (courts) to enforce contractual obligations. It needs infrastructure to deliver goods (roads) and to run businesses (power; water; garbage; police). All successful markets have rules. The so called "free market" proponents simply lobby for the rules to be changed in such a way that those at the top make more money; they are almost never lobbying for extra actual net freedom, but just a different skew to the rules so that they can take home still more of the profits.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  Sounds like a pro-government propaganda. Illegal market places exist and operate successfully despite breaking laws, hiding from the police and not having anyone to enforce contractual obligations.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    They tend to degrade into cartels. With the absence of courts, they do stuff like decapitate the competition.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      When only people who are willing to risk imprisonment participate in those markets, violence is to be expected, no? Extrapolating that to what would happen in an actual absence of law seems unsound.

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago

So long as there are levers of control, people will attempt to exploit them. The government at every level, should have no power to prohibit entities, whether government or not, from providing internet service. Freedom of transaction is a basic human right (whether the Bill of Rights talks about it or not, read the Preamble to the Bill of Rights and you'll see the Bill of Rights doesn't create rights, according to the Bill of Rights, it creates limitations on government from violating those rights.) Even if you disagree with the above, the First Amendment is unquestionably part of the constitution and thus this is a violation of freedom of speech (internet is speech.)

colechristensen 10y ago
>The government at every level, should have no power to prohibit entities, whether government or not, from providing internet service. Sure they should. You're being ridiculous. The first amendment doesn't mean anyone can do anything because you can pretty easily cast a wide net and classify everything as speech. I can't freely express myself with a firearm and shoot anybody I don't like. Likewise, governments can regulate commerce. They're generally doing a pretty bad job when it comes to the Internet in many cases, but it's very much not a first amendment issue.
- 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
  Wow. It's ridiculous to oppose the government stopping people from getting economic broadband? And you compare it to shooting people with a fire arm? I knew that the loony left had taken over HN, but this is really around the bend. This site use to be a place where people believed in the Internet, and believed that people hat a right to communicate.
rayiner 10y ago
The government (the state of North Carolina) is simply choosing not to go into the Internet business. The municipality is just an organ of the state government. So it's the government telling itself what to do. Why should that not be permitted?
10y ago

bcheung 10y ago

One thing to point out that I think people are missing is that the ruling was that a government could not operate a business in a different jurisdiction. It has nothing to do with free market or net neutrality concerns.

jfoutz 10y ago
It still seems weird. I can think of many small municipalities around here that can't quite do things on their own. Sharing water, fire, police, electricity, sewer, gas, roads, busses, trains, schools, hospitals and garbage services with a larger town seems pretty reasonable. I mean, as long as it's not forced on any of the participants. The internet must be really dangerous in some way to require the special regulation. edit "Electric is provided with a contract with the City of Wilson, however Pinetops owns and maintains all distribution lines to Pinetops citizens and businesses." [1] [1] http://pinetopsnc.publishpath.com/departments http://pinetopsnc.publishpath.com/departments
- bcheung 10y ago
  It didn't sound like that was ruled out. If the other city wanted to contract with them it would probably be possible.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    "Wilson decided not to appeal the court decision and voted to terminate the service agreement with the town of Pinetops, Wilson's city spokesperson, Rebecca Agner, told Ars today." The agreement looks like it was between the two towns. I wonder how it's fundamentally different than electricity.
sgnelson 10y ago
I haven't read the ruling, so I'm talking a bit out of my ass here; however, that's rather nonsensical approach considering that many areas of the country have multi-jurisdictional systems in place for services. As an example, arguably the largest and most well known being the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but is just one of many many examples[1]. Further, these type of multi-jurisdictional systems are becoming ever more important as cities continue to grow and encompass other counties (never mind other states), and the creation of (as well determining who pays for) infrastructure becomes an ever more important issue. There could be an argument to be made that telecommunications infrastructure is a different beast than traditional mass transportation, highways, etc. However, I reject that notion out of hand as this has not been even been the first type of new infrastructure that the US has dealt with in it's history (electricity, original telecommunications (telegram/telephone) being the most obvious.) But let's not beat around the bush, the law and the ruling are nothing more than typical bought and paid for members of a different level of government (NC is not a home rule state, and the current Republican run legislature already has a long history of gross overreach into municipal matters) creating less competition so that oligopolistic entities can make a large amount of money on the backs of the public. Time Warner Cable (Spectrum now I guess) owns the NC legislature, lock stock and barrel. [1] See links for more data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_district_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_district_(United_State... and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_powers_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_powers_authority

openasocket 10y ago

It should be noted that it's not like this ISP is shutting down, it's just being barred from serving customers outside its county. This action shuts off service for about 200 people, but the ISP will continue to serve over 7,000. Still pretty bad, but not as bad as the headline makes it seem.

themartorana 10y ago
How are government sponsored protectionist laws like this even legal? It's very frustrating. Edit: For further context, both towns wanted the service, which makes it even more frustrating. If Wilson made its service private there'd be no issue. Can a private enterprise be government owned? I guess not? How about a tiny startup with one person operating billing and they call it a "private-public partnership"? I'm grasping at straws, I realize.
- MR4D 10y ago
  What about a non-profit? Sort of a way around the issue. Further, everything you buy avoids sales tax, so that alone gets you an 8% cost advantage.
pistle 10y ago
This was a warning shot to other muni's in NC capable of adding another angle of attack against the entrenched monopolies of internet access there. If Time Warner didn't win this one, they know the cities of, and suburbs around, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Durham could start tearing away customers. Removing the context makes it seem small. The game was far larger.
- justifier 10y ago
  exactly before realising you said 'warning shot' on my first read through of your comment i read it as 'winning shot' precedent seems to hold more value for a lawyer than the law itself is that criticism or explanation of affected legal systems?

dpark 10y ago

What stops Pinetops from forming a municipal broadband corp that simply subcontracts everything to Greenlight?

jauer 10y ago
This is pretty much what my town does for their public electric utility. I moved from larger town A (has an electric utility, a lot of trucks, linemen, and a yard full of transformers and cable spools) to smaller town B and noticed that while the billing address changed pretty much everything else stayed the same. Town B might have one linemen, but I see town A's people and trucks every time there is a major project and town B's substations are fed from a substation run by town A.
thyrsus 10y ago
Wilson established its internet service before the law went into effect, and probably paniced the monopolies into getting the law passed, since their service was so utterly superior and cheaper in cost to anything the monopolies offered. Wilson only barely managed to get grandfathered in; the law also prohibits any new government provided internet service. Example: Chapel Hill, NC was busy designing public WIFI service, but has abandoned that to the incumbent Time Warner Cable monopoly WIFI. Oh, you don't have a TWC account? Sucks to be you. My opinion: the legislature is totally corrupt. The only silver lining is that Google is (a) a "private" concern and (b) is coming to me in a few years. AT&T is also competing right now, but their "fiber" turns into ADSL a few hundred yards from the customer. The non-Research Triangle Park areas of the state are screwed until Google can provide competition. It would be far better for counties/cities to start that competition now.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  I did a tiny bit of research this evening, because this sounded so crazy. My opinion: People on the edge of wilson county should petition to redraw the county line. Eroding the tax base might scare the legislature into being a tiny bit more sane.

grahamburger 10y ago

I've spent most of my career (15+ years now) building and maintaining private regional ISPs that compete with big TelCos, with considerable success. It's surprisingly feasible to start an ISP in your garage with a few thousand dollars and grow it to a few hundred customers just by providing decent customer service and a working product. If you've ever been curious about what it takes to get started with something like that I'm happy to answer questions - here or email in my profile.

iopuy 10y ago
For community benefit, do you think you could give us a quick summary of the stages involved? Specifically, how does one go about leasing a connection from a larger Telco? Doesn't this normally cost 10 of thousands of dollars per month?
- grahamburger 10y ago
  Sure! For the better part of 2015 my job was to fly in to specific markets in the US and spend 2-4 days building a plan for a wireless ISP network that would be built a few months later. I'll summarize the process that I used, perhaps that will be helpful? First I should explain that my experience is in fixed wireless networks[0] more than fiber. First, I would spend some time on Google Earth looking for good neighborhoods to serve. A good neighborhood is typically a dense suburban development with low tree growth. Then I look for potential places to put the access points to serve the area - you really need line of site (no trees) to each home to provide good service. Water tanks, mountains/hills, office buildings and even residential homes make good access point locations. Often you can negotiate a rooftop lease with a place like that for a few hundred dollars a month (or even less). You can also use commercial cell phone towers, but they're more like 1-2k/month. You really want to be able to see a few hundred rooftops within 5-10 miles of your access point location to make it worthwhile. Next you need to figure out how to get service to your access point location, like you mentioned. You really only need a few hundred mbps circuit to start though, a 1gbps circuit will last you up to a few hundred customers at least. Your first circuit shouldn't cost more than 2k to maybe 3.5k / month. The hard part is finding it in a place where you can then get it delivered to your access point location. Sometimes you get lucky and find an office building near a suburban neighborhood that already has a fiber demarc in the basement - that's a slam dunk. More often you have to lease space on an office building in the city, buy your fiber circuit there, and then use a high capacity wireless backhaul to relay the service to your access points. I would usually just drive around the main roadways looking for the orange stickered fiber whips to see where the fiber lines run, then call the company to get pricing. (can't find a photo at the moment, I'll keep looking.) Then, you just start building and signing people up. Lot's of people make the mistake of trying to go cheap on the customer install, many WISPs start by trying to install their customers with in-home radios rather than putting them on the roof. That doesn't work. Regardless of the type of equipment you use, you have to put a good radio on the roof with a reasonably high gain directional antenna pointing to your tower. The other common early pitfall is to try to use regular WiFi devices for your network. WiFi is designed to work well in buildings / office parks, not so much outside and long-ish distances. Ubiquiti equipment is a good start and very cheap, although there are better ones. The hardest part about signing up customers is paying for their equipment up front. You're looking at 250-350$ per customer installation (including amortizing infrastructure build) if you're in an area where the incumbent is really bad you can sometimes charge some of that to the customer. The ROI isn't too bad even if you eat that cost - less than a year - but it can be hard when you're starting out. The next hard part is jumping over the scaling humps. You'll need a staffed support center and NOC before you're fully able to afford it, for example. Disclaimer - this is what I'm working on know, providing a variety of the backend services that these WISPs usually need / benefit from but can't afford to build on their own. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_provider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov...

jrowley 10y ago

This seems like a fairly clean cut case of corruption. It's amazing how external money can drive legislation and political action. Why would these politicians ever try to block this on their own accord? Do they really fear a government monopoly that much? Or maybe they just love small government (with the exception of the military/military contractors, which need to be bigger of course).

xupybd 10y ago
I love small government. But if certain infrastructure makes more sense at a municipal level ideology should go out the window. We don't have a lot of private roads because it just doesn't make sense, the normal competition driving efficiency model falls over because the most efficient solution involves only one road per route ( over simplifying here ). I think the same maybe true with the local loop of consumer level internet connections.
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  A big difference is that roads are (roughly) a government monopoly—reudcing competition while these municipalities are adding competition. The idea is that in poorly functioning markets the government can step in with an alternative, especially one that is obligated to at least break even in order not to stifle innovation, to restore the market. This really ought to be a bipartisan idea. I beleive the Roosevelt institute his written on this, let me find a link.
  - pitaj 10y ago
    Many would say that these markets are poorly functioning due to government interference in first place, like these very laws, for instance.
    - Ericson2314 10y ago
      Traditionally, such laissez-faire views would distinguish government constraining itself and government constraining the private sector, approving of the former and not the latter. But I'm down to look at both the same way (especially when, as I wrote, government is constrained not to indefinitely run at a loss so as to play by more similar rules). That said, I know of little historical evidence that market competitiveness restores itself in the absence of external meddling. The fact is in telecom we are coming off a history of official monopoly, competition, and then a near-reformation of the monopoly without the increased regulation to go with it. So it sure as hell looks as if we backed off the controls and market-based approaches failed. Now it could be that post-deregulation and trust-busting, there was still too much regulation, but again I don't often see laissez-faire views claiming that government entry into the marketplace must be allowed. A middle ground that I'm more receptive to is that a never-interfered-with market will always self-correct, but past interference interference may have distorted the market into an otherwise-unreachable state where self-correction is not possible. In that case we should with heavy intrusion try to force the market into a good state, and then slowly easy off the controls carefully monitoring to see if such self-correction does occur. Economic pontificating aside, with wired networks I think there is a legitimate public interest in fewer redundant wires (like roads), and too much incumbency advantage with the amount of infrastructure required, for me to put much faith in market-based approaches. Wireless networks on the other hand largely avoid those problems so I think that's a better area for them.

vpeters25 10y ago

I don't how how the actual law is written but maybe the Muni could just supply dark fiber and allow private ISPs to provide the actual broadband service.

sitkack 10y ago
Who is going to start a company to supply 200 people with Internet?
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Maybe people like this: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-building-its-own-gigabit-fibre-network https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bu...

plandis 10y ago

This seems almost by definition of government working for corporations over its citizens. What a sad day.

droopyEyelids 10y ago
Now is the time for all good hackers to come to the aid of their country

xupybd 10y ago

How is lobbying still legal in the USA? Isn't it clear as day corruption, where you pay for influence over the government? I thought Americans valued freedom?

washadjeffmad 10y ago
The freedom for an individual (a minority) to out-buy popular, widely held, value-backed ideas (the majority) with one's own money is about as American as it gets. What is the government's role if not to protect minorities from the will of the majority?
jomamaxx 10y ago
'lobbying' just means individuals or groups speaking to their government reps. There's nothing wrong with it. It's when there's a disproportionate power imbalance that we run into problems.
- xupybd 10y ago
  Isn't there disproportionate power there now? Large amounts of money can be used to employ full time lobbyists. These full time lobbyists mean you can pay for influence that the ordinary citizen would not have the resources to achieve.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    Yes, there is definitely a problem. But 'lobbying' itself is not the problem.
posterboy 10y ago
The market will fix it
otterley 10y ago
> How is lobbying still legal in the USA? Lobbying is well-protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is considered "core political speech," or, alternatively protected under the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. There's an entire body of First Amendment law out there for you to study if you're particularly interested.

ams6110 10y ago

I call BS on this: The Vick Family Farms predicament was described in a recent New York Times article. The business has used Greenlight's faster Internet to support a high-tech packing plant that automatically sorts sweet potatoes by size and quality, with each spud tagged with its own bar code. “We’re very worried because there is no way we could run this equipment on the Internet service we used to have, and we can’t imagine the loss we’ll have to the business,” farm sales head Charlotte Vick said. Potato-sorting and tagging does not require internet access.

markrages 10y ago
Maybe they are internet-of-things potatoes which require server access for full functionality.
monitron 10y ago
Maybe software updates? Remote monitoring/control? Something really off the wall like sweet potato classification by cloud-based neural network computer vision?!
Grue3 10y ago
Yeah, but watching Youtube and Netflix to pass the time while potatoes are automatically sorted does.

lucaspiller 10y ago

> There are laws in about 20 states that restrict municipal broadband, benefiting private ISPs that often donate heavily to state legislators. I'm not that clear on how US politics and 'lobbying' works, but why don't you just call it what it is - a bribe? In this case 200 families will be back to slow speeds and poor service ISP (who no doubt will be putting their prices up) just because said ISP has enough spare cash to bribe the politicians. How is that fair?

isubkhankulov 10y ago
how else will politicians make decisions? corporations need to guide them on whats best for the people. /s in reality, antitrust provisions really need to kick in. even in nyc, time warner dominates and has local monopolies in many buildings.
beagle3 10y ago
As long as it's not "this favor for this donation", it is legal in the US and not considered a bribe. It's not even a bribe when constantly give donation but threaten to stop them if the legislator doesn't follow your wishes [0]. The DOJ was petitioned to investigate but refused to even look into it, so, (by fiat, or rather lack of it) it is legal. [0] http://www.zdnet.com/article/chris-dodd-and-the-mpaa-bribery-or-politics-as-usual/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/chris-dodd-and-the-mpaa-bribery...
tehwebguy 10y ago
Perhaps major news outlets could adopt a style guide to push public opinion on donations like this? * This news organization chooses to report all political donations that appear one step away from quid pro quo as "bribes" Or maybe a new word should be made up that is given a dirty connotation like "bribe" but one that keeps lawsuits further at bay.

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

"""There are laws in about 20 states that restrict municipal broadband, benefiting private ISPs that often donate heavily to state legislators. """ Aha! And all became clear.

Animats 10y ago

This shutdown increases the "economic liberty" index slightly.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12518783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12518783

duncan_bayne 10y ago

Good. The fewer coercively funded projects like these the better. To describe this as "community" broadband as some commentators do is really propaganda. Consider how absurd it'd sound if someone spoke of a "community Air Force".

AnsemWise 10y ago

I have nothing to add other than my voice of agreement about the clear corruption of these laws. What is the benefit, to the people of North Carolina, of restricting municipal ISP growth? What rights are being protected by these laws? I am disgusted by the clear disregard of the people of NC's interests, but also by the lack of action by the people themselves.