quote:
Personally, I would love if regulation weren't necessary, and that more local governments would start rolling out fiber. Unfortunately, there are laws in many states preventing this (paid for by big ISPs), and in states where it is legal ISPs oppose municipal fiber every step of the way, crying foul over every little thing. There are lots of great reasons for cities to operate their own networks. Smart networked electric grids reduce outages, smart traffic control, etc. Being able to sell excess capacity to citizens and increase revenue is an added bonus. It's win-win-win all around, except for the ISPs who would prefer to spend their money lobbying and buying politicians rather than upgrade and compete. Is it unfair for a for-profit company to have to compete with partially taxpayer-funded services? Perhaps, but all across the country we have private companies doing contract work for government. It's likely that ISPs don't wa

HERE is the solution.

The federal government should outlaw the franchising, ROW exclusivity activities and regulation of ISPs by state and local governments TODAY.

Inviting the FCC to regulate the ISPs as utilities is a very BAD idea.

These ISPs will soon side with government and will be seeking to have their profits and monopolies entrenched as did the telephone companies in the twentieth century. Rates for long distance were based on the amounts the FCC approved and they based them on the returns of investments they thought the companies should have. We were all screwed for decades and innovation was never brought to market that would threaten the status quo guaranteed profits of the Bells. (the first cellular call was made in 1946.)

Obama is wrong on this and those that want real access to broadband choices should not support this and should instead scream for the end of local and state involvement.

I suspect soon we will see more and more content providers getting into the ISP business. It would not surprise me at all that a Netflix or Google or Apple will be giving away ISP services for access to your home with their paid content. We simply have to get the government out of their way.

This post was edited on 11/13/14 at 3:05 pm