New Bill Would Stop States From Banning Broadband Competition

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rgMekanic

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A new bill introduced by Rep. Anna Eshoo hopes to stop states from banning broadband competition. The Community Broadband Act (HR 4814) declares that no state may pass legislation that would "prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting any public provider from providing, to any person or any public or private entity, advanced telecommunications capability or any service that utilizes the advanced telecommunications capability provided by such provider."

This will be fantastic if it gets passed. Regulated lack of competition is what has been killing the broadband market all over the country, and it would be outstanding if it finally ceased to be. It's just a shame that all those who died when Net Neutrality got repealed won't be here to see it.
 
Yeah, sure. The devil is in the details, or in this case: Page 17,675,432 paragraph four line six..

..Or wherever..

I would hope people are smart enough to look for the fine print by now.
 
Hmm, this appears to just be about public providers ( not sure if it doesn't anything or helps anything when it comes to competition with private providers)?
 
Can you name all the companies that "died" due to the repeal of "network neutrality"? I didn't know that it killed some providers? Or did I misinterpret?
 
cjcox said:
Can you name all the companies that "died" due to the repeal of "network neutrality"? I didn't know that it killed some providers? Or did I misinterpret?
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I took it to be a more tongue in cheek comment about all the hyperbole around people who said people are going to die because of X...in this case, Net Neutrality repeal.
 
This bill will suddenly disappear without a trace
 
i'm just a bill
just an ordinary bill
and i am sitting here on capitol hill
.....

be interesting to see what happens to this bill.
wish my town did broadband by itself, my town has it's own electric plant and has the lowest rates, pretty much in the state,...would want that for broadband, i'd switch in a minute, but except for like 1 block of houses. you can get DSL from verizon or you can get Cable from Comcast.

that is it. no Fios, not other providers, DSL from verizon or cable.
 
I just read through the bill. I kind of dig it. Maybe then AT&T or someone would step up to offer Gigabit broadband where I live and I could upgrade to them. Or better yet a municipality based broadband would be awesome.
 
Read the text, and this won't even get a hearing in committee. The Federal government dictating to states and municipalities that they cannot forbid themselves from becoming Internet providers. Even if this by some miracle did get passed (stand alone bills like this don't get passed, they get tacked on to bigger bills) it would be challenged in court immediately and most likely be thrown out as unconstitutional.
 
Assumed she must be a democrat and of course she is. This bill is dead in the water already.
 
Ok... please enlighten me what is wrong with this bill?

It says hey state or county or parish or what have you. You can not have exclusivity agreements with your broadband providers. It is against the law.

1. Current contracts would go until end of term... grandfathered in.
2. Competition for customers business would only grow.
3. Municipalities who made an uninformed decision would now have a path open to them that was legally closed by the broadband provider before.

I fail to see the issue.
 
fuzzylogik said:
Hmm, this appears to just be about public providers ( not sure if it doesn't anything or helps anything when it comes to competition with private providers)?
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Nope, nothing about private providers, except that rules/regulations can't be made to give public providers an advantage.
 
Grimlaking said:
Ok... please enlighten me what is wrong with this bill?

It says hey state or county or parish or what have you. You can not have exclusivity agreements with your broadband providers. It is against the law.

1. Current contracts would go until end of term... grandfathered in.
2. Competition for customers business would only grow.
3. Municipalities who made an uninformed decision would now have a path open to them that was legally closed by the broadband provider before.

I fail to see the issue.
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Not entirely sure where you got any of that.

Section 1: A state government can't regulate a local government (city, parish, indian tribe etc) from providing telecommunication services to it's locality. This is fine, I guess. In practice does it matter? How many local governments are providing broadband services in an area that doesn't have a private service available?

Section 2: Any law or ordinance or rule applied by the local government to private services have to apply to the locality provided service also. This means your local mayor can't dream up a free internet service for your town and then apply stupid rules to private companies in your town to keep private companies in an unfair position, effectively making it so they can not compete against the service your mayor is providing. This is also fine, it just makes it a fair play ground for everyone.

Section 3: Any law, ordinance or rule applied by state or federal government also has to apply to the public service. This is also fine, more of those play fair rules. Also, this section defines what a public provider is, basically saying if your mayor wants to create a new broadband service using local tax dollars, then it would be a public service.

So, most of the bill is fairly benign. It's saying that public services can be created and not interfered with by state governments. If your mayor wants that broadband service, then by god the state can't stop him from creating it. Only catch being that this new service he wants has to play by the same rules as any other service provider in the area, public or private. So, if what's here doesn't do much, what is the purpose of it?

The only thing I can see is they want more public services to be created without states telling them they can't do it. This is the federal government telling the states to fuck off, if your mayor wants to create that service. Not entirely surprised this comes from a democrat, they tend to favor fiscal legislation that favors the power of the federal government over states rights. This isn't creating any service or telling anyone to do so, it's just keeping states out of it and not stopping anything from being created.
 
This is a pipe dream, it will never happen. Just like all the bills introduced to stop daylight saving time from starting up, they never come to fruition.

This is just proposed to make political points so they can say "SEE SEE? I TRIED!" even though they damn well knew it was going nowhere.
 
Stinkfist said:
The only thing I can see is they want more public services to be created without states telling them they can't do it. This is the federal government telling the states to fuck off, if your mayor wants to create that service. Not entirely surprised this comes from a democrat, they tend to favor fiscal legislation that favors the power of the federal government over states rights. This isn't creating any service or telling anyone to do so, it's just keeping states out of it and not stopping anything from being created.
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I discussed this bill with a lawyer friend of mine last night. When I mentioned the states right argument you could hear his eyes roll from a mile away. His quote.. "There is no such thing as states rights." States don't have rights. And this bill is healthy because it gives every city/state/parish/whatever the ability to tell the cable companies that have been abusing exclucivity contracts... to get stuffed that these can no longer be renewed.
 
Grimlaking said:
it gives every city/state/parish/whatever the ability to tell the cable companies that have been abusing exclucivity contracts... to get stuffed that these can no longer be renewed.
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See, I'm not reading that from here. There is no mention of rules or regulations set on private companies. I guess if said cable companies are making exclusivity contracts with the state, then sure. Even if that were the case, there's still the problem that the only thing being protected here is public services. This says nothing of another private entity, which is what REAL competition would be. It's not helping anyone, unless said anyone lives in a town/parish/reservation that provides a public advanced telecommunication service to the public who lives there. It's not the first time this bill has been proposed either, https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/1853 was shot down in the senate in 2008. And per wikipedia on that particular bill,

"The Community Broadband Act S. 1853 was a bill (proposed law) that was never enacted into legislation by the U.S. Senate,110th Congress[1] The act was intended to promote affordable broadband access by allowing municipal governments to provide telecommunications capability and services. [2] Supporters of the bill believed it would have encouraged widespread broadband development in the United States by overturning existing state bans on public broadband deployments and eliminating existing barriers to broadband development.[3]"

So I'm inclined to believe that this bill is exactly about states rights. I know there's "no such thing as states rights" and all, but that's what this is. If the federal government wants to stop a state from doing something, they can do it. But will the states like it? Hell no they won't. See Marijuana legalization, which is a shit storm that's about to hit supermassive here in a bit.

Anyhow, if there is to be real competition, then PRIVATE COMPANIES have to invest in infrastructure to get their own services up and running. Which most of them WILL NOT do, simply because the cost of laying new cable in a place that already has a provider is too great of a risk. The only time that has ever happened is when a new technology is being implemented, say like fiber vs copper cable services, and the only reason it's happened is because they have a selling point in that the technology they are implementing is better than the existing technology, which gives people a reason to switch. I would LOVE to see companies step up and start putting down their own infrastructure to compete with existing services, but that is not happening any time soon in the US. The cost, risk and reward isn't there for them.


EDIT: For more reading on the subject, check here: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...aws-states-use-to-crush-broadband-competition

This is the type of shit this bill is trying to get rid of.
 
Perhaps we read that differently. And I'm fine with that to be honest.

What I read. No exclucivisity is allowed for broadband services. That's the short answer.

If you think broadband companies WANT communities doing a co-op for broadband you are so very wrong. When a cable company or another company comes in they specifically put into place regulations that specifically prevent that as part of their contracts.

10 years ago communities didn't know what they were giving up.

Now they are starting to get it.
 
still won't change anything as that doesn't change the cost involved in building out networks. The people with the money to deploy stuff won't spend it to do so due to poor return on investment. Those that would be willing don't have the money to build out fast enough.
 
Municipailities with enough population will be able to get bonds to do the deployment. More than a few near me have done so, but not mine... YET.
 
Grimlaking said:
Municipailities with enough population will be able to get bonds to do the deployment. More than a few near me have done so, but not mine... YET.
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that is then assuming they care about the average people. Every city near me doing anything like that is going after mid to large business only. They have zero interest in residential.
 
Exavior said:
that is then assuming they care about the average people. Every city near me doing anything like that is going after mid to large business only. They have zero interest in residential.
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You should appear at the city council meetings and ask for that as well. Doing it for business's is a good idea. They are the life blood, but plenty of people today buy houses based on the type of broadband they can get as a consideration.
 
jardows said:
Read the text, and this won't even get a hearing in committee. The Federal government dictating to states and municipalities that they cannot forbid themselves from becoming Internet providers. Even if this by some miracle did get passed (stand alone bills like this don't get passed, they get tacked on to bigger bills) it would be challenged in court immediately and most likely be thrown out as unconstitutional.
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Why would it be unconstitutional. the internet crosses state lines. You pay for it, you buy things over it, you conduct business on it. It is interstate commerce, and you have state governments forbidding local entities from engaging in interstate commerce. This is falls under the commerce clause without even bending the rules to the currently accepted limits.
 
Grimlaking said:
You should appear at the city council meetings and ask for that as well. Doing it for business's is a good idea. They are the life blood, but plenty of people today buy houses based on the type of broadband they can get as a consideration.
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Wouldn't have mattered. I can't go into too much details about everything due to NDAs and all that good fun. However I have been involved with the back side decisions of these plans. I work for an ISP that was helping either with design or some other aspect of the planned networks. We helped with cost breakdowns of different types of builds and in every case all these places, no matter how they were designing the network all of them only cared about big business. One designed a loop around part of the city. You pay $1400+ a month to lease a fiber between two points in the city. You then have to have to pay to bury your own fiber drop between your office and that loop, then find somebody to connect out to in order to actually get connected to the internet and pay them. The other models in use by a few places is they put in fiber and then have somebody come in (ISP or other type of company able to run an ISP network) and do a profit share from anyone connected. One city made it clear that their network was not allowed to be used to connect to residential. They didn't want to waste their fiber by having it used by people who aren't going to give them as much of a profit share as that will just make them have to spent more money putting in more fiber. We offered to use their fiber to build out to our own equipment and build out from that to residential and they said no to that also. If we want to build out to residential customers there we would have to build out own fiber network through the city by passing their network. Another city went through and figured out the cost to go to every single house, then changed their minds and decided they only wanted to ensure they could get fiber to about 100 businesses and that was it. Many other cities that we had talked with and helped do cost analysis have had similar plans, they only want to put in enough fiber to hit the 50 - 100 larger businesses and that is it. In many cases even if they could hit a few apartments or residential areas they don't want to.

I do know of one city that did it in a way to truly help everyone. But that is one out of 10 cities that I have been privileged to the interworking of their city fiber plans. Which i know isn't how everywhere is or will be, however i wouldn't be surprised if that is how the majority would be.
 
that is interesting and I'm not terribly surprised. I don't think cities are planning on the mellenial home buyers that are going to be coming to market. New high end apartments around me are offering 1 gig up and down from FIOS. Homes... you can't get it. Once this market starts targeting home buying they will want the same or better connections.
 
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