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Re: Community Broadband Act would overturn bans on municipal broadband
From: "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2007 06:28:24 +0900
-----Original Message----- From: Brett Glass [mailto:brett () lariat net] Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2007 6:11 AM To: dave () farber net; ip () v2 listbox com Subject: Re: [IP] Community Broadband Act would overturn bans on municipal broadband Dave: For IP, if you will. The Community Broadband Act, as it is currently written, is fatally flawed. While it prevents a municipality from granting certain regulatory preferences, it fails to prevent municipalities from giving one provider an exclusive on the use of the network. To date, municipal networks have largely amounted to "sweetheart deals" between government and a single provider -- almost always a large corporation rather than a smaller local firm. Often, the favored company is a telephone or cable company -- as it is in Powell, Wyoming, where the telephone company TCTWest will be the only company allowed to offer services via the municipal network. In exchange for a (usually modest) investment in building the network, the municipality often gives one provider all of its business, barring competitors -- including smaller ones and ones which arrive after the project has started -- from either using the publicly subsidized resource or getting business from the municipality, which is often the largest customer in town. And because other providers are often not allowed onto the network for many years, if ever, the favored provider can "lock in" business indefinitely -- a blow from which competitors find it difficult, if not impossible, to recover. It's as if the government, in exchange for some free service or some payola, were to build a highway on which no delivery company but Federal Express could operate its trucks, leaving other companies' drivers mired in traffic unless they built their own parallel, private roads. Public infrastructure should not be built for one private company's benefit. For this bill to be acceptable, it must prohibit any municipality which is building a network from preventing any telecommunication provider, large or small, from delivering service over that network. And it must prohibit exclusive contracts which give a provider preferential access to the municipality's business -- or any other special privilege. Finally, it should prohibit municipal networks from monopolizing the unlicensed spectrum provided by Part 15 of the FCC regulations (a practice which would also harm competition by hobbling wireless competitors). If these commonsense prohibitions are not added to the bill and enforced, competition will suffer and consumers will have fewer choices -- not more. Brett Glass, LARIAT.NET ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Community Broadband Act would overturn bans on municipal broadband Dave Farber (Aug 04)
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- Community Broadband Act would overturn bans on municipal broadband Dave Farber (Aug 04)
- Re: Community Broadband Act would overturn bans on municipal broadband Dave Farber (Aug 04)