“This is crazy”: FCC kills part of San Francisco’s broadband-competition law | Hacker News Reader

“This is crazy”: FCC kills part of San Francisco’s broadband-competition law

arstechnica.com

33 pointstolien5 comments

This article seems like fear-mongering/muckraking.

The voices in the article complaining about the FCC ruling are saying that it's impractical to share in-use home wiring runs, so of course the Article 52 law shouldn't be read as requiring MTE building owners to allow such sharing.

Okay, except that DirectTV had petitioned the FCC to do exactly that in the past - multiplex their signal over an in-use home run to a tenant unit. The FCC said that the feedback they received at the time on DTV's proposal cast doubt on the ability to do this cleanly, so they would not accept DTV's proposal to require it.

In this present ruling (subject of the article), the FCC is agreeing with the MBC petition that the City can't now require this. The City says their law doesn't require this. The FCC responds that okay, then no problem; but if someone were to try an interpret it this way (since we have providers on record trying to do exactly this in other venues) just know that it would be invalid.

So what's the problem? Why try and frame this as an oppressive FCC crushing the benevolent City's intentions? It's a boring clarification unless someone has interest in actually doing what the FCC is prohibiting, which the City says it's not, so.. someone's making much ado about nothing, probably to fan political sentiment. And Ars Technica is being a stooge or complicit.

> Pai accused San Francisco of playing word games, saying in today's meeting that "it is difficult to understand how anyone can be harmed by a decision to preempt a city mandate that the city itself claims doesn't exist." Pai said that if the city is correct that its law doesn't apply to in-use wiring, there's no reason for it be concerned about the preemption.

This is confusing. If SF itself claims the law doesn’t require this, why are they concerned about the FCC saying it can’t do that?

As far as I can tell from the article, the law remains in place except for the part SF says doesn’t exist and the FCC says it dislikes.

San Francisco passed a rule that said an apartment building can’t make the choice about which carrier they use. But apartments often make deals with carriers in which they get paid if they’re exclusive to one carrier.

Of course the first thing this does is reduce competition: it costs at&t, Comcast, etc less to buy off the building owner than actual competition would.

So SF required that building owners allow residents to use which ever carrier they want. That requires either installation of additional cables, or sharing the building cables.

The FCC makes the claim that the only option is sharing the cables, and sharing the cables will make companies less likely to invest, harming the competition. It deliberately ignores that the current competition is not the price paid by residents by the private paid to the building owners. Once the carrier gets that contract in place their is no competition for the actual residents.

SF points out rightly: the legislation does not require shared cables: the carriers can choose to put in additional cables, but that’s a dumb thing to pay for. Carriers have turned around to say essentially “having to invest in cables means we won’t invest in cables”, and their paid enforcer has done their bidding to block that.

Except I don't think anything in the FCC ruling invalidates the sharing of inside wiring unless it's requiring the sharing of 'in-use' wiring.

The FCC press release states, "Agency Narrowly Pre-empts Part of a San Francisco Ordinance...The Commission preempts part of an outlier San Francisco ordinance to the extent it requires the sharing of in-use wiring in MTEs. Required sharing of in-use wiring...threatens the Commission’s framework to protect the technical integrity of cable systems for the benefit of viewers."

"to the extent that it requires sharing of in-use wiring" is the key here. Notice they cite "technical integrity of cable systems for...viewers". This wording is not accident - it's because DirectTV had petitioned them to require cable companies to let them run their signal over an _in-use_ home run from a traditional cable TV company.

Where are you reading that this agency ruling invalidates all of Article 52? Or specifically the part that SF requires building owners to allow residents to use a carrier of their choice?

I don't see that anywhere, but maybe I missed it.

I think what it is, is that the FCC stalled the full vote, on the basis of the clause?

>Pai's proposal said the FCC doesn't need to fully understand San Francisco's law in order to preempt it.

This particularly seems like a really weird claim, and an attempt to set some kind of precedence

I'm specifically confused because I don't actually understand what powers preemption grants the FCC, but the whole story feels like a power play whose details I can't elucidate. If its not a power play, then it reads like a bunch of nonsensical behavior, which is doubtful

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