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Sure, but they are paying those fees in exchange for the incredibly valuable privilege of (usually) an exclusive monopoly on broadband in an entire city. This
by xp84 3y ago
Sure, but they are paying those fees in exchange for the incredibly valuable privilege of (usually) an exclusive monopoly on broadband in an entire city.
This was the contract they accepted when they eagerly signed such a deal, because the last thing those companies want is to have a bunch of little fiber outfits going around wiring up all the richest and easiest-to-deploy neighborhoods with quality fiber internet service. Or -- g-d forbid -- municipalities cutting them out and laying fiber themselves. Their franchise fee protects them from either of those horrors.
Pretending they're the victim for covering the costs they agreed to, and then acting like consumers are being unreasonable when we don't pay what was forced on us by our one choice of ISP is the boldest hypocrite move I've heard of yet from telcos.
- tptacek 3y agoFranchise agreements usually do not grant exclusivity to providers. And they're not the only fees we're talking about; counties, states, and the federal government apply pass-through taxes to ISP customers as well. Go look yours up. I just did, to make sure (I have opinions on this weird issue because I'm on my town's governing commission for this stuff --- go join yours too, I've gotten to do all sorts of cool stuff that I wouldn't have predicted from the nerdy charter of the commission --- and after 18 months of falling asleep every time the topic of the franchise agreement came up, I finally stayed awake and learned we were making a fairly huge amount of money by soaking residents for their ISP connections).