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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

When is it coming to NYC?

So far, every single Fiber city is in a red state: GA, TX, NC, KS, TN, UT. My guess is you'll be waiting a long time.

Pretty sure Google Fiber doesn't have much to do with politics. Correlation does not imply causation. However, I do agree that it will be a while until NYC gets Google Fiber.

Actually Google has made it pretty clear that it does have to do with politics; specifically, how easy the local/state governments make it for them to roll out fiber. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that red states may have a lighter regulatory/more pro-business hand.

Red states also seem to be more in bed with the entrenched ISP monopolies. The states which are prohibiting municipal broadband are all red states.

It may be less about being "in bed" with the ISPs than the philosophical point of view that internet service is properly a private sector concern, not a governmental one.

All the "philosophical" views become rather hypocritical when those who have them receive a lot of money from monopolists who want to prevent competition. So stop the nonsense please. It's not about any philosophy. It's about money.

Source?

https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?type=C&c...

Worth reading the footnote:

> This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2013-2014 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

> The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families.

And that makes a difference how exactly? ISPs are owned and controlled by various family clans and key people there.

In the end, the result is that politicians are paid to push the agenda of existing monopolists.

If that were even remotely true, they wouldn't be enacting laws to protect the entrenched ISP monopolies. They'd be passing laws reinstating things like local loop unbundling.

It has everything to do with politics: one party is more prone to regulation than the other, and it's easier to build where there is less regulation. There's a spectrum of regulation levels in the country, and Republican areas tend towards the lower-regulation side of the spectrum.

That logic doesn't seem to work as expected. Didn't community broadband face problems because of the local overregulation backed by existing monopolists? Many of those states are Republican dominated. So it means they are perfectly fine with regulation which protects monopolists, and they oppose one which boosts competition. Google is a threat to existing monopolists too, so why aren't they opposing the effort?

You don't need lobbying to convince republicans to oppose public sector solutions to markets already served by the private sector.

You're right. A more nuanced way of putting it would be that the Republicans prefer that government interfere less with economy. To that end, they support regulation which restrains government from interfering with the economy, and are against the more-typical regulation which directly interferes with the economy.

I think this restraint has merit, but not when applied to interference with monopolies and utilities.

> more nuanced way of putting it would be that the Republicans prefer that government interfere less with economy. To that end, they support regulation which restrains government from interfering with the economy, and are against the more-typical regulation which directly interferes with the economy.

But in this case this logic isn't even correct. Since they support laws which ban competition, and that is clearly interfering with the economy. I.e. it's interfering for the benefit of monopolists, and against the benefit of their competitors and the public. I get an impression that this abstract idea of "don't interfere with the economy" is simply inconsistent. More consistently that position looks like "against competition", which equals against free market.

Community broadband is not competition, it's seizure of a market by the government, an entity that does not have to make a profit and has generally broad authority to take other people's money by force.

More ISPs is competition and more choice for the public. Having a monopoly is surely not competition. There are no two ways about it and no amount of demagoguery will change that fact.

I'm not sure how it's related. If anything, many "red" officials today seem to pretend they hate stronger ISP competition and like monopolistic stagnation.

Interestingly, Oregon is a blue state consisting of a blue city (Portland) surrounded by red (everywhere else), and all the non-Portland areas are ready and raring to go, with only Portland as the hold-up...

The amount of regulations involved in NYC to do anything makes it extremely unlikely that Google fiber will ever make it to New York unless the laws change.

Wasn't it the problem for some areas where Google Fiber was proposed too? They removed some bureaucracy from the way. Why can't NYC do the same?

NYC bureaucracy is on a whole different level from KS, TN, etc. NYS in general has ludicrous amounts of regulation compared to most states, and NYC is the creme de la creme.

What exactly is regulated in case of ISPs?

Typical regulations include:

1) Franchising, especially if you want to offer TV service (which is the money-maker). The city has to approve your overall deployment plan. As part of that deployment plan, you will usually need to agree to:

A) Build-out requirements. Cross-subsidies for poor neighborhoods are baked-into the process in almost every city. You have to build out to every neighborhood in the city above a minimum density.

B) Franchising fee. Usually a % of revenues.

C) Contributions for public services. The municipality will usually require you to spend (a few to tens of millions) per year on things like providing free fiber to government buildings, or contributing to local public TV programming, etc.

2) Permitting. You need a wide variety of permits for: A) laying cable; B) stringing cable on utility poles; C) tapping into the grid to power fiber cabinets; etc.

3) Negotiating rights of way.

4) Miscellaneous regulations: environmental permits, etc.

There are also the broader political dynamics. In NYC, de Blasio has turned FiOS deployment into a social justice issue: http://www.speedmatters.org/blog/archive/new-york-mayor-bill... ("If you can’t afford to feed your family by the end of the month, you can't afford $75 a month for the broadband service. And that's what we have to fix.")

Google's MO is to say "fuck you" to all that. They only agree to build Fiber on the condition that the municipality gets rid of build-out requirements, fast-tracks permitting, etc. Second and third-tier southern and western cities are willing to play along, because they see fiber as a competitive advantage. Cities like San Francisco and New York are not, because demand to live and work in those cities is so high to begin with.

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