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Comment by otakucode | Hacker News Reader

Be careful... in many places, it is illegal to offer a telecom service that competes. In many places, Comcast and similar have exclusivity contracts with the municipalities. And of course if you're going to be digging trenches and running lines, you need legal right-of-ways through properties or pole access rights to run lines on poles. In most places, they don't want any more cables run than are already present, so the only way to get those rights is through heavy political manipulation.

Also, if you live in a nice permissive place and you get all set up, don't be surprised if Comcast techs cut all of your lines and claim they didn't realize they shouldn't have done that. It wouldn't be the first time.

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See, THIS is what we should be fighting. NN is unnecessary if we have actual competition. Those exclusivity contracts, to me seem like Sherman Antitrust Act violations, since they are effectively creating cartel-like conditions to limit interstate commerce (i.e. commerce over "the wire.")

Digging trenches and laying out cables over entire neighborhoods is probably natural monopoly territory... i.e. it's not easily achievable without proper regulation / governemnt involvement. Therefore, another way to look at this is:

Proliferating internet access has been a big public/private partnership, and therefore we need NN to ensure that it continues to serve the public good. We shuld be fighting for the "public" part of the public/private partnership to not get fleeced.

Exactly. This is why Internet access is a public utility. No municipality wants 50 lines going pole to pole. I was curious about the idea of Internet as a public utility, so I did some research. I wanted to know what made people declare electricity, water, natural gas, etc to be regulated public utilities instead of just a free market setup. After reading some beautiful quotes from people opposing the establishment of such things (including many quotes from people certain that no reasonable person could ever want, much less need, a telephone in their own home when they could walk to a local store (because businesses were the only ones with legitimate need) and use theirs), I found that it comes down to one single question:

Does the benefit gained by society by having the service be ubiquitous amount to something greater than the damage done by the elimination of competition? If the answer is yes, then it should be made a public utility. I don't know how anyone could honestly argue that the private oligopoly setup we have now is so valuable to preserve that it provides more value to society than would ubiquitous Internet access. Just the fact that we could actually write laws on the assumption that people have Internet access would provide such tremendous benefit and enable us to get rid of some much duplicated junk as to be monumental.

Who cares what the "local government" wants, what do the people want? The people could probably care less about huge lines being run if they can get their internet faster and cheaper.

Our condo building in Seattle is one of the first to land a landmark experience... we have 3x coax cable providers in our building; per unit, we can select and move between the providers.

They are all playing in this space because they want the customers and revenue, but it took a long time for the gentlemen's agreements between the firms to start.

The installers for Comcast (the most recent to enter our building) were super professional, friendly and did a great job.

Hope other cities are able to fight down the exclusive contracts etc.

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