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Comment by ZitchDog | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me quite a bit of my situation when we built our new house. Our local cable company is Mediacom, which serves smaller markets. They were extremely flaky about running cable just 2 blocks from an existing drop. Fortunately after extensive research, I discovered that our local telecom ordinance (which gives Mediacom exclusive rights in our city) requires them to run cable to new houses in a timely matter. After months of delays, once I threatened to file a formal complaint with the telecommunications commission, they ran a cable to our house within two weeks.

The problem is, it's fairly expensive to dig cable to a single house, and it's just not worth it for the cable company to dig. If we decide that broadband is a necessity, some sort of municipal broadband or government oversight is absolutely required to guarantee that each person has access, because the market sure won't.

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> I discovered that our local telecom ordinance (which gives Mediacom exclusive rights in our city)

Do you have a copy of the ordinance, by chance? Exclusive cable franchises are illegal under federal law. If you're litigious, you might be able to get the ordinance overturned.

What would be the result of having it overturned. It's unlikely any other companies will provide service, due to the expense of building out and the need to compete with an incumbent reducing the profitability of the build. Much better for a Comcast style company to wait and buy the company than to compete.

Do you have a copy of the federal law, by chance?

47 U.S.C. 541(a)(1). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/541. Part of the 1992 Cable Act: http://www.lib.niu.edu/1994/im940207.html.

"A franchising authority may award, in accordance with the provisions of this subchapter, 1 or more franchises within its jurisdiction; except that a franchising authority may not grant an exclusive franchise and may not unreasonably refuse to award an additional competitive franchise. Any applicant whose application for a second franchise has been denied by a final decision of the franchising authority may appeal such final decision pursuant to the provisions of section 555 of this title for failure to comply with this subsection."

Theoretically, a pre-1992 contract negotiated before the law was passed might still be in effect. In practice, these contracts had 5-10 year terms and expired long ago.

I have a small amount of experience with this, having observed the negotiations between a city government and Mediacom. The deal, in that case, wasn't technically "exclusive", but it did require that any additional franchisee provide equal or better service.

In practice, this meant that the deal with Mediacom was "exclusive" since the market was small enough that no other provider would be willing to roll out the full set of services offered by Mediacom (another provider might have been willing to offer basic services to capture cost-conscious consumers). I'm not sure what the federal law says about this sort of thing.

I don't think that's been litigated. A few years ago, the Sixth Circuit upheld FCC rules that put an end to some of the more egregious municipal licensing authority requirements, though those rules didn't address the situation you raise: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=132938372903668....

This is interesting. We currently only have Comcast cable available and I just found the contract online. Looks like it was created 2001 and has a 15 term on it. Ok now I'm reading it more and it's a "nonexclusive cable franchise" but I don't know if that means other people can come in here.

Wouldn't you need standing for that? If you were actually trying to found a competing ISP, that would work, but "I'm a customer who might get better service in a freer market" doesn't sound like standing.

There's days where I dream of packing up and moving just to get to a market that isn't served by Mediacom.

> which gives Mediacom exclusive rights in our city

> because the market sure won't.

What market? You have no market there. A monopoly is not a market. Your free market hatred is showing.

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