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> Do the laws prohibit private companies from installing fast internet?

Effectively, yes. They can't outright ban competition, but they make it very unattractive using franchise provisions, namely build out requirements. See: http://crosscut.com/2014/03/04/business/118993/google-fiber-...

Unless you have unlimited capital, the most practical way to start a competitor to Comcast, etc, is one neighborhood at a time. Start at the high end, and pick off the local incumbent's high-margin customers. This would have a disproportionate impact on the incumbent's bottom line. However, in most cities, this is simply not allowed. You have to build out everywhere in order to be allowed to build out anywhere. Where I live, in Wilmington DE, more than a quarter of the city lives below the poverty line. Verizon refuses to build FiOS here, in competition with Comcast, because there is no point building $60+ per month fiber service to neighborhoods that can't afford it.

What happens in the US is that municipalities will sign exclusivity agreements with certain companies (Comcast, AT&T, TWC) to encourage them to lay down the infrastructure.

Imagine you are the mayor of Podunk, Arkansas and you want your constituents to have access to high speed internet. AT&T and Comcast won't rush to lay cables to your town because there's simply not enough business for them to compete for. So, as mayor of Podunk give AT&T an exclusivity agreement for 20 years in exchange for them laying down the infrastructure today.

The problem is obvious: now AT&T doesn't have any competition and they can do whatever they want with their prices. Your population is hostage to the exclusivity agreement for the next 20 years.

One possible solution for this problem would be the government to build the infrastructure and then invite companies to compete for it's usage. That's what happens in UK and other countries.

Granting exclusive franchises for cable have been illegal under federal law since 1992.

While true, your statement is completely irrelevant, as is that section of the law to which you refer. Local governments simply switched to leasing right-of-way access; cable companies now simply pay for exclusive access to that, instead of exclusive control of a given franchise area.

I don't know where you're getting that from. That is explicitly prohibited by 47 U.S.C. 253(a): "No State or local statute or regulation, or other State or local legal requirement, may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the ability of any entity to provide any interstate or intrastate telecommunications service."

See: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=KM_NU7Pg.... Section III(A).

The NTIA has a 50-state survey of right of way laws here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=KM_NU7Pg...

It is explicitly prohibited and done all the time. Investigate the current situation with Baltimore, Maryland regarding its Comcast franchise as an example of how these things are still a problem, despite Congress' attempts to prevent it.

The executive summary here is that the laws you cite protect some services without protecting other services that may commonly be bundled. In the Baltimore situation I mentioned, only Comcast can provide cable TV. Verizon won't roll FiOS out to most of the city, because they wouldn't be able to sell television services alongside the internet and telephone services. It's rumored this also prevented Google Fiber from considering Baltimore as a target market. So, while the letter of the law agrees with you, that any entity can provide service, the city has signed an agreement with Comcast that makes it financial suicide to attempt it.

It is not enough to parse the laws; you must also understand how they interact with the actual actions taken by real governments.

Its funny you mention Baltimore. I researched the issue extensively because I'm moving there in a month.

Baltimore's agreement with Comcast is non-exclusive for television service: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2004-09-21/news/0409210094_....

The reason Verizon doesn't offer television service in Baltimore is because it doesn't have a cable TV franchise from the city. The reason it doesn't have one is not because Comcast's contract is exclusive, but because the city won't give Verizon one unless they agree to build out FiOS to the whole city. Verizon won't do that because it makes no financial sense to build fiber everywhere in a city where a quarter of the population is at or below the poverty line. It dramatically increases their cost per actual subscriber, which is already iffy for FiOS to begin with. Verizon hsd built internet service only to a few high end communities, something that doesn't require a city-wide franchise.

Google won't enter Baltimore for the same reason Verizon won't. Google does not agree to build out requirements for Google Fiber. They demand the right to only build fiber in neighborhoods where enough people sign up to justify it: http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2014/05/g....

All such agreements are non-exclusive, by law, as you pointed out. It is fairly universal in franchise agreements to require universal buildout and public-access channel service in exchange for certain amenities the local government can provide. In the case of Google Fiber, they chose not to pursue a TV franchise and Baltimore was smart enough to stick to their buildout requirements. It has the same effect: Google can't sell TV service on terms it likes, so Baltimore is not a market. In the case of FiOS, it's far more likely that Verizon would like to have -- and could not get -- a piecemeal franchise in the city, and simply decided that not being able to sell TV meant it was more cost-effective to try selling 4G access as broadband in the city.

In either case, Comcast signed a buildout/franchise agreement, and the economy has shifted since then to render such agreements less profitable. That, combined with Comcast's boilerplate 'most favored nation' clauses it generally gets into their agreements, renders all of your arguments moot, as far as the end result for the populace goes: there is only one game in town. The fact that it technically shouldn't be that way is just academic.

The Sun article you linked regards Baltimore County. Baltimore is not in Baltimore County. I wish you better luck with your future research.

Give me a break, they both signed agreements in 2004 and I posted that at 2am... This page has excerpts from the city's franchise agreement with Comcast. As you can see, it's non-exclusive: http://www.baltimoregrassrootsmedia.org/PublicAccessTV/Franc....

This directly contradicts your assertion claim that Baltimore gave Comcast an exclusive franchise for television.

> It is fairly universal in franchise agreements to require universal buildout and public-access channel service in exchange for certain amenities the local government can provide. In the case of Google Fiber, they chose not to pursue a TV franchise and Baltimore was smart enough to stick to their buildout requirements.

It is fairly universal, but it is also what suppresses competition in the market. Verizon and Google won't touch those terms with a 10-foot pole. Its not smart of Baltimore to stick to those requirements, because it means people in Baltimore won't get fiber.

> That, combined with Comcast's boilerplate 'most favored nation' clauses it generally gets into their agreements, renders all of your arguments moot, as far as the end result for the populace goes: there is only one game in town. The fact that it technically shouldn't be that way is just academic.

Sure, there is one game in town, but my argument isn't about that. Your claim, an oft-repeated bit of misinformation, is that cities get around 253(a) by granting exclusive right of way to certain providers. Or maybe your claim is that cities get around 253(a) by granting exclusive franchises for television to a single provider. The implication is that a competitor is legally precluded from entering the market. However, the reality is that cities don't do those things. What they do instead is succumb to class warfare politics, and make the terms of getting a franchise unattractive for competitors.

The question is: who is to blame. People on HN like to make it seem like cable companies negotiated themselves sweetheart exclusive deals. But the reality is that municipalities are to blame. Between the build out requirements and random cash grabs for public access, cities put up massive roadblocks to potential competition. Only the incumbents are willing to put up with them.

The bottom line is that companies like Verizon and Google are ready and willing to build fiber in places like Baltimore. But the city won't let them unless they agree to ridiculous terms. The fact that even Google refuses to agree to such nonsense in Fiber cities should tell you who is at fault here.

I'm very sorry if you feel I've attempted to mislead you, but the end result is the same: in most US cities, there is only one television provider, and it's always one that has negotiated a favorable contract with the local government. I know you don't think this is possible, that it's been outlawed, and that you're prepared to spend your life asserting that there is no way for a government to cause an exclusive franchise to exist, but there is, and they do. In my city, for example, the government just outright sold land to Time-Warner. Time-Warner doesn't pay for access to the right-of-way because they don't have to any more. In return, my city (and the county it's in) got fiber rolled out city wide.

I'm also unsure why you think that a simple business decision by Google is some sort of Moral Designator. It is the job of a city government to protect the less fortunate. They're not going to achieve that by letting corporations serve rich neighborhoods and ignore poor ones. I'm not sure how a city can "make the terms of getting a franchise unattractive for competitors" by holding them to the same terms as the existing franchisees.

I'm not really interested in having some kind of politically-charged debate with you about it, and now that you're throwing around phrases like 'class warfare,' I've realized you don't have any other actual motivation here. Sorry to have wasted your time on the matter.

Coincidentally, the upside to having the Post Office in the letter-delivery business. They deliver to Podunk, Arkansas where a private company could easily decide it just wasn't worthwhile.

also, when AT&T wires up Podunk, they connect the government and school buildings for free.

Ah, true! Forgot to mention that.

"Cities should not be in the telecommunications business."

You state that as if it is self-evident, and yet cities have run all sorts of utilities for a long time. Internet access is fast turning into a utility.

I have a lot of sympathy for this sort of argument, but I'm starting to think it might be wrong in this case. Like it or not, the project of wiring a city for broadband is going to involve a fuckton of waiting for permission from the city government. There is no "just go do it without government interference" option -- you have to deal with the existing underground architecture, get licenses to dig, get licenses to install hardware, etc. I think at the end of the day it might be simpler to just let the city do the job than to create some huge beaurocratic interface between the city and an ISP.

Cities generally have to be at least partially in the telecom business, or there'd be five independent sets of telephone poles on every street.

In some areas customers can choose among competing providers to have their natural gas delivered through a single set of lines. I've often wondered how feasible it would be to have do something similar with Internet access: The government owns and manages of the physical network infrastructure, but users have a choice of private and/or non-profit ISPs to provide actual Internet service (ie, routing traffic in and out of the municipal network).

Obviously there are a lot of details to be worked out, but are there any significant technical reasons this couldn't be done?

This is the norm in other industrialized nations. It's called local loop unbundling [0], and comes in several different forms. In some countries the local telco monopoly is prohibited from selling to end customers and must lease their last mile cables to other companies at regulated rates. In others they must just provide access to the cables.

There's a lot of evidence that mandatory LLU reduces prices and increases speeds.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Loop_Unbundling

It's not a dream either. There are still plenty of places in central London you can't get decent broadband, never mind the countryside.

It's also relevant to note the background for LLU: the cables were almost all installed by a government owned telco, so there's a clear argument for the infrastructure being owned by the taxpayer. LLU came into existence as government telcos were privatised in the 90s to avoid creating a private monopoly.

I think this makes a lot more sense in the case of gas/oil, where you actually need something to fill the tubes.

Funny, South Korea has government managed fiber and in fact, they have some of the fastest and most pervasive broadband in the world[1]. Much more-so than the USA.

[1] http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ (check out the infographics and note the 24Mbps speeds in South Korea)

South Korea is smaller than my state of Missouri. Now let's see how fast the US can provide broadband speeds if they dumped all their resources into my state alone.

I doubt SK is "dumping" all the resources of the USA into its broadband infrastructure. But that's beside the point. USA telcos/cablecos have had ample opportunity to provide decent service. The whole time, they've been coddled by government regulation. When the regulators screwed up and allowed too much competition (e.g. UNE-P) the telcos squealed and the pain went away. Telcos/cablecos don't like government-run competition, because they don't like competition, full stop.

So then why doesn't New Jersey do this? It is smaller than SK and has comparable population density: 1288 vs 1171 per sq mi. Or how about NYC? Or LA? People keep bringing up USA size or density statistics when talking about government run utilities, but there are plenty of places where they could work given a will to invest in public infrastructure.

Because in the US, planning and zoning falls not under the fed, not under the state, but under the city/county level. In Korea, the fed basically said, nope, we're going to approve this everywhere.

Why do you think google fiber is so selective? Because it is a regulatory nightmare for google to get the unbelievable amount of paperwork done for approval. Even for cities that want to work with google, a lot of them still aren't really able to due to the amount of bureaucracy and red tape required to pass planning/zoning committee muster for each county/city/etc.

The state doesn't do it. Public companies do and most of them don't service just one state or city.

South Korea has about half the per-capita GDP of the US. Why would you think the entire resources of the US would be necessary to give Missouri similar infrastructure?

Forget SK and MO for the moment: how about San Francisco? It's got some of the highest population density in the country (18K people per sq mile), which is 208 times the density of MO. But the city government of SF is more than happy to pass on the buck to ATT, with its shitty "Uverse".

We don't need "innovation", we need a reliable utility.

Here in the US my water and sewer are handled by the city. It's pretty cheap and effective. I don't need more "innovation" in my water delivery.

My electricity is delivered by a regulated monopoly provider that answers to a Public Utility Commission and has a strictly regulated profit margin; it's purchased from one of a hundred retail providers. The supposed benefits of competition haven't materialized - we're paying the same for electricity now as we did when all electricity was a single regulated monopoly on an inflation-adjusted basis, only now no private investor will pony up for capital investment projects so we keep building cheap crappy power plants. Otherwise it's the same as before and it seems to function fairly well.

Either of these would be a huge improvement and exactly what the government is best at - handling public infrastructure that is ill-suited to competition or forms a natural monopoly.

In fact I'm suffering from Verizon's "innovation" right now thanks to their refusal to upgrade peering links. They're "innovating" ways to choke traffic to seek rent/extract money on my private transactions with Netflix, Crunchyroll, and others, despite the fact that I am already paying them for use of their network (and they used my private property to lay lines to the rest of the neighborhood - something for which I am not compensated).

I do not have any choices; my neighborhood has congested capped cable from TW or Verizon's artificially congested FIOS. That's it.

Frankly when Ma Bell/ATT was broken up I firmly believe it was done in a way to serve ATT's long-interests by keeping the retail and lines in the same ILEC box. It let the (D) government appear to be "doing something", right up until the (R)s proceeded to never meet a merger they didn't like.

What we need to to break apart Verizon and ATT and turn the physical plant into a regulated delivery company (DeliveryCo) charged with running fiber to the 90% of reasonably-reachable homes in the USA. That physical infrastructure should serve us for at least 100 years - we know how to send 10Gbps/100Gbps and more down the line and the expensive part is digging up yards/streets; the boxes on either end are a pittance by comparison. I suspect it would actually serve us for 1000 years or more but it's The Future so who knows.

Let anyone who wants to start an ISP do so; DeliveryCo just drops the ISP fiber/ethernet cables at whatever datacenter you like in your city and they're responsible for backhaul/transit, billing, customer service, packages, etc. Let DeliveryCo be effectively transparent with VLANs or IP/IP encapsulation so as far as my router and my ISP's router are concerned DeliveryCo doesn't exist.

People can claim it doesn't work, but the regulators seem perfectly capable of demanding 60hz+/-@120V AC be reliably delivered to every home with guaranteed response/repair times (except in cases of emergencies). When my underground cable gave out and started arcing with the dirt they answered the phone and sent a truck within 2 hours and it was repaired within 5. If DeliveryCo's regulator said they had to deliver 1Gbps links I don't see why it would differ.

> I don't need more "innovation" in my water delivery.

> In fact I'm suffering from Verizon's "innovation" right now thanks to their refusal to upgrade peering links.

Your water utility is using century old infrastructure that in many states is not in compliance with Clean Water Act standards, and in most places dumps untreated sewage into the local river when it rains. Nobody wants to invest the money into fixing things, because investment decisions are highly politicized and effectively made by a rate setting board. We're $300 billion behind in terms of investment for wastewater systems: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wastewater. The ASCE grades almost all of our water infrastructure as a "D." http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/grades

You're talking about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

And you're implicitly claiming that corporations will necessarily do a better job, despite the overwhelming number of Clean Air Act violations charged to them every year: https://www.google.com/search?q=clean+water+act+violations+2...

Addendum: the interesting takeaway to me, from the Verizon data, is how over provisioned the rest of the network is. Operating well below capacity. What piece of municipal infrastructure is built with that kind of headroom?

> Cities should not be in the telecommunications business.

Why not? If they can do it cheaper and better, they should.

Any other position is religious idiocy.

The Internet is a public environment, so IMHO you'd be insane to think that 1) someone's not doing exactly what you're talking about already, and 2) that you're somehow safer with AT&T and/or Verizon. The situations you're describing are the exact reasons why people use TLS.