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"Look I'm sorry mate but I'm just running this wire through your house to give your neighbor internet, if you don't let me you're in the wrong" "Sorry but we n
by arg01 12y ago
"Look I'm sorry mate but I'm just running this wire through your house to give your neighbor internet, if you don't let me you're in the wrong"
"Sorry but we need to tear up this highway and disrupt traffic for the next couple of weeks to lay some fibre. I know someone else did the same thing last week but they were another company and it's illegal for the local government body to stop any of us laying stuff on public land when we want"
Obviously that extreme is untenable. You may be after something a bit more useful like unbundling, but in the US you have to explain how forcing a private company to let competitors use it's cable is not outright stalinistic communism.
- logicchains 12y agoThere's a difference between not allowing ISPs access to public lands and outright prohibiting them from offering their services. Obviously if they wanted to run wire through a house they'd have to get the owner's permission, or the local government's permission to dig up a road. The thing is, as the law currently stands they're forbidden from doing so; even if every household in they city signed a contract saying "sure, let company X run cable through our yard", company X still wouldn't be allowed to sell them internet over that cable. Maybe a company could innovate and develop some form of fast wireless mesh network. But even if they had the technology and finances to do so, local laws stating "the only company allowed to sell fast internet here is Comcast" or equivalent prevent them from doing so.