8 ms·

State Laws That Stop Cities From Installing Fast Internet

273 points by nickreese 12y ago

briandear 12y 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.
- ceejayoz 12y 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 12y 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?
    - nmrm 12y ago
      I think this makes a lot more sense in the case of gas/oil, where you actually need something to fill the tubes.
    - necubi 12y ago
      This is the norm in other industrialized nations. It's called local loop unbundling [0], and comes in several different forms. In some countries the local telco monopoly is prohibited from selling to end customers and must lease their last mile cables to other companies at regulated rates. In others they must just provide access to the cables. There's a lot of evidence that mandatory LLU reduces prices and increases speeds. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Loop_Unbundling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Loop_Unbundling
      - mseebach 12y ago
        It's not a dream either. There are still plenty of places in central London you can't get decent broadband, never mind the countryside. It's also relevant to note the background for LLU: the cables were almost all installed by a government owned telco, so there's a clear argument for the infrastructure being owned by the taxpayer. LLU came into existence as government telcos were privatised in the 90s to avoid creating a private monopoly.
dba7dba 12y 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"
- shimshim 12y 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 12y 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.
    - shimshim 12y ago
      Hah, that crossed my mind before I posted but yes I should have said red flag. Thanks for the clarification.
steanne 12y ago
there's a few more states with restrictions of various sorts. http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap
superbaconman 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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/greenlighthistory/ https://www.wilsonnc.org/living/fiberopticnetwork/greenlight... http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/time-warner-and-embarq-cant-compete-with-city-owned-isp-trying/ http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/time-warner-and-embarq-ca...
- waps 12y 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.
  - Chronic29 12y ago
    Some types of porn are illegal. So what's the problem with censorship?
  - wmf 12y 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.
  - otterley 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  Zero is also less than two.
  - bostonpete 12y ago
    Agreed -- if your logical/programmer side interprets <2 as ==1, then be careful with your code refactoring. :-)
    - nailer 12y ago
      Maybe it's a signed int. :^)
      - nailer 12y ago
        Meant unsigned, thanks autocorrect. But anyway, there's still +0 so nevermind.
  - sixothree 12y ago
    Zero providers is also fewer than two.

273 points by nickreese 12y 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.

ceejayoz 12y 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 12y 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?
  - nmrm 12y ago
    I think this makes a lot more sense in the case of gas/oil, where you actually need something to fill the tubes.
  - necubi 12y ago
    This is the norm in other industrialized nations. It's called local loop unbundling [0], and comes in several different forms. In some countries the local telco monopoly is prohibited from selling to end customers and must lease their last mile cables to other companies at regulated rates. In others they must just provide access to the cables. There's a lot of evidence that mandatory LLU reduces prices and increases speeds. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Loop_Unbundling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Loop_Unbundling
    - mseebach 12y ago
      It's not a dream either. There are still plenty of places in central London you can't get decent broadband, never mind the countryside. It's also relevant to note the background for LLU: the cables were almost all installed by a government owned telco, so there's a clear argument for the infrastructure being owned by the taxpayer. LLU came into existence as government telcos were privatised in the 90s to avoid creating a private monopoly.

dba7dba 12y 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"

shimshim 12y 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 12y 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.
  - shimshim 12y ago
    Hah, that crossed my mind before I posted but yes I should have said red flag. Thanks for the clarification.

steanne 12y ago

there's a few more states with restrictions of various sorts. http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap

superbaconman 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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/greenlighthistory/ https://www.wilsonnc.org/living/fiberopticnetwork/greenlight... http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/time-warner-and-embarq-cant-compete-with-city-owned-isp-trying/ http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/time-warner-and-embarq-ca...

waps 12y 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.
- Chronic29 12y ago
  Some types of porn are illegal. So what's the problem with censorship?
- wmf 12y 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.
- otterley 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Zero is also less than two.
- bostonpete 12y ago
  Agreed -- if your logical/programmer side interprets <2 as ==1, then be careful with your code refactoring. :-)
  - nailer 12y ago
    Maybe it's a signed int. :^)
    - nailer 12y ago
      Meant unsigned, thanks autocorrect. But anyway, there's still +0 so nevermind.
- sixothree 12y ago
  Zero providers is also fewer than two.