[IP] Re: Community Broadband Act would overturn bans on municipal broadband

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

-----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



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