Bridgewater Telephone sues to stop city building fiber-to-the-door, even though it won't do it itself
Bridgewater Telephone, in Monticello, Minnesota, is fighting to prevent the build-out of a fiber-optic network in town, even though it refuses to construct one itself. When 74 percent of residents voted to allow the city to upgrade the local infrastructure at taxpayer expense, the telco filed suit to stop it doing so. From Ars:
Bridgewater Telephone argues that the city cannot use tax-exempt bonds to "enter into direct competition with incumbent commercial providers of telephone, Internet, and cable television services." The odd thing about the complaint, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica, is that it makes almost no argument; instead, the company simply quotes a short bit of Minnesota law and essentially says, "See, it's illegal!" without offering an explanation.The statute in question says that cities can use bonds to fund nursing homes, garbage collection, parks, playgrounds, "homes for the aged," and more, including "any utility or other public convenience from which a revenue is or may be derived." If the judge finds that fiber-to-the-home is a "public convenience," the case seems to be over.
Small beer, big consequences.
Telco wouldn't install fiber network, sued to prevent city from doing so [Ars Technica]
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Rob, I just went to the store and forgot to buy beer. You're just rubbing it in, aren't you?
Depends on the beer!
Um, this is the Internet. Why not post the complaint so that law-minded readers can decide whether this is really a "fuck up" or a company trying to enforce its rights against a government acting in contravention of law or its contracts?
As Ars veers more and more into opinion journalism, it get harder and harder (for me at least) to evaluate the credibility of its stories. The few that I've looked into, though, show an inverse correlation b/w heat and light--i.e., the shriller the story (and the more links from Digg, Consumerist, BB, etc.), the shakier the basis of the outrage. But social and semi-social media do love them some outrage, I guess.
why do ISPs, backbone and fiber companies refuse to build? Money obviously. What is the smallest transaction that current economies of scale permit?
Ten bucks? One dollar? A dime? Why aren't we already at the fraction of a cent level for profitable transactions? The processing power continues to increase, the cost decreases, the bottle neck is the transmission...Finally got around to Rainbows End. Myriads of fractions of a penny in affiliance groups adding up by virtue of universal connectivity and essentially free unlimited processing power. Obviously the MAFIAA,Hollywood and government in general fear loss of control which would happen if they are not he ones to sit on top of all these tiny salami slice transactions.. so they conspire deliberately and unknowingly with transmission corporations to retard the development of the massive, ubiquitous fiber the new economy needs.
This happened in Lafayette, Louisiana, too.
The city wanted to connect its municipal fiber ring to everybody's home, and attempted to issue bonds ~$100M.
BellSouth and Cox Cable sued, killing the project (eventually).
This is one of those Realpolitik issues where I fall off the strict libertarian bandwagon. Ideally, eliminating the subsidies and protections (e.g. rights-of-way) for those aforementioned "incumbent commercial providers" would force them into real competition. But absent of that unrooting, if people in a local jurisdiction can agree through direct democracy on a plan to build a fixed fibre loop with a fixed bond float to be paid-off by property taxes (whose properties will be connected to said fibre loop)... that's about as good as government action is honestly capable of -- and even then those same local citizens will have to be ever vigilant of regulatory capture by those same "incumbent commercial providers" attempting to monopolize that fibre infrastructure.
c.f. Bob Frankston's Assuring Scarcity and David Isenberg's Rise of the Stupid Network