The administration continues to act in removing Federal jurisdiction and regulations from being used as a tool to prevent startup organizations from entering established markets.
This case is a success in that it removes significant incumbent advantages. Let's hope poor behavior and sloppy work (breaking connections too frequently) doesn't become common. And shame on the incumbents using regulations for financial gain.
Is this really a good example of a success? I see it as one incumbent battling another incumbent over literally billions of dollars of future ad revenue. To me, a good example would be a true startup (fewer than 15 people, less than $5M revenue) getting the FCC to side with them without spending millions.
Likewise — and people often miss this angle — Comcast is a bit of an upstart itself in comparison to the two major incumbents, AT&T and Verizon. The two basically hold a duopoly on nationwide last-mile access, and they are using all their political power to prevent Comcast from becoming large enough to challenge them as a National last-mile telecom (they currently only offer service in something like 40% of the households in the US).
The prime case-in-point is the TimeWarner Cable merger that was scuttled — such a merger would have made Comcast effectively national, and a serious competitor to the old Bells. Meanwhile AT&T purchased DirecTV less than a year later (a deal worth more than the TWC acquisition in both dollars and customers) and the whole thing got rushed through quickly.
Do you think we would still have wired home Internet connections without Comcast? I know they’re a terrible company to be a customer of (what telecom isn’t though?) but when you look at the larger picture, they’re constantly stymied by the FCC from getting “too big” — meanwhile, their two biggest competitors are 2-4x larger on a revenue basis. Verizon and AT&T would drop their residential landline business in a heartbeat if Comcast weren’t around driving demand for it — the way Comcast’s tech architecture works makes it cheaper for them to serve the residential market than AT&T or Verizon will ever be able to do with wired connections.
> The two basically hold a duopoly on nationwide last-mile access
This is obviously not true since neither Verizon nor AT&T operate hardline access nationwide. Even if you mean copper phone wires specifically, you're leaving out CenturyLink.
Copper phone lines are of course the slowest last mile hardlines. Coax is far superior, and cable ISPs are growing relative to DSL--where the choices are Comcast vs Verizon DSL (for example), Comcast has higher market share.
Verizon FiOS competes directly with Comcast, but is offered in only about 20 metropolitan areas--and even then, incompletely. (FiOS is available in DC but not in Alexandria, which is right across the river.) Verizon stopped growing their FiOS footprint years ago.
> Verizon and AT&T would drop their residential landline business in a heartbeat if Comcast weren’t around driving demand for it
Verizon and AT&T (and CenturyLink) are required by law to provide residential telephone landlines to anyone who asks for it. What does that have to do with last-mile broadband?
This is nonsense. Comcast used to be AT&T Broadband in my region and they are the sole provider of broadband access in my entire region of the Midwest outside of major metros. They have something like 1/3 of all broadband customers, that’s an upstart? What they actually are is a combination of pieces of smaller companies, some of their assets being made up of the “baby-bells” that the behemoths have re-acquired over the years.
> I see it as one incumbent battling another incumbent over literally billions of dollars of future ad revenue.
This is a little reductive. Although Google Fiber is a sibling company related to Google and probably heavily subsidized by parent Alphabet, it's incorrect to say that Google Fiber is selling billions of ad revenue.
I think this is a good example because it starkly puts in contrast the power dynamics: if an ISP that is strongly subsidized by Alphabet can't even break into the market, we know things are really bad.
This is a great move on the path towards making 15-person startups competitive, and it isn't insignificant. Success and failure are not a binary all-out choice between total ISP monopolistic domination and 100% free market for 1-person startups. It's a sliding scale, and any movement in this direction is a success.
You didn't set politics aside at all in this post. Your opinions are politically charged, or at least have significant political implications —though I suspect you know that.
I'd say it's more like they're closing a loophole in an existing regulation. Existing pole owners were already required to allow competitors to add their cables. What this does is prevent them from creating indefinite delays to prevent said competitors from actually doing so.
As but one example: removing net neutrality only serves established players who can afford to pay for access to each of their customers.
Just try to start a business when it requires separate contracts with (and payments to) each and every
ISP in the country.
Most of t admin’s drive against regulations has no impact on startup activity whatsoever: the amount of methane released by oil wells, mileage standards, etc.
The statement by OP furthers the fallacy of proportional trade-offs between economic success vs environmental and other harms.
Redirecting money and supporting certain businesses/industries through regulation is one of the more negative consequences that every American government has contributed to.
Regulatory capture (like in this case), subsidies that interfere with markets, bailouts, etc all cripple the economy by propping up businesses/industries that would otherwise die and make way for new competition.
Referring to “this case” as an instance of “regulatory capture” is weird. Incumbents lost this particular battle more than two decades ago, when the 1996 telecom act mandated nom discriminatory access to pole attachments for competitors. This is an additional rule to correct behavior that was trying to get around th spirit of the law (causing delays in the process). Regulatory capture requires regulated entities to take action beneficial to incumbent companies. For pole attachments, it’s been a 20 year process og doing the opposite.
Interesting to see this decision today, as I was just speaking with my Google Fiber tech about their Nashville rollout.
Apparently there was so much heel dragging pole access, they ended up laying their fiber in tiny channels cut into the road.
As an aside, I also heard the channels weren't cut deep enough initially, so they were forced to go back and redo part of the work after much of it was considered complete.
I don’t think Google Fiber is expanding, but it did spur the rest of the ISPs.
AT&T seems to be expanding its gigabit footprint rapidly (https://m.att.com/shopmobile/internet/gigapower/coverage-map...) and not just to most affluent sections of the metro area where I live. Comcast is trying but they are still overpriced compared to AT&T and the upload speeds are abysmal- 35Mbps
There is an assumption among folks in the tech community that there is no competition between providers serving different markets--i.e. what Verizon does in Maryland cannot affect what Comcast does in Delaware. However, the idea that Google Fiber is "spur[ring] the rest of the ISPs" to roll out gigabit is accepted without question, even though Google Fiber serves very few markets. Verizon, for example, upgraded FiOS to gigabit even though Google Fiber serves no Verizon territory and has shown zero willingness to overbuild another fiber provider, and after Google Fiber announced it was downshifting deployment.
It's hard for big telcos to move fast (it was hard for Google to move fast in this area). What telcos are doing today is responding to what happened 5 years ago. Where they're doing it is responding to what happened 6-12 months ago.
Because Google wasn't able to get traction on their construction in San Jose, AT&T had time to do street surveys and order custom multistrand fiber with drops for a splitter at every pole, and then get the fiber actually on the pole before Google got much of anything done. Existing carriers can run new cable on poles they already have access without a lot of hassle.
Otoh, Google primarily wanted to show it could be done and spur others to, faster eyeballs without capital costs is a win. If you can't get 10mbps for YouTube on a gigabit connection, something is clearly broken.
Did you mean to write "pole" instead of "poll"? (Genuine question - I'm not sure whether "poll" is a term with some meaning in the telecom / isp industry.)
It did spur competition where Google Fiber was announced. The ISPs were tripping over themselves to match Google in those cities.
But as soon as Google announced the demise of Fiber, they mostly put the brakes on those expansions. They may still expand their own fiber initiatives now, but it's nowhere near as fast, and you won't get as cheap 1Gbps fiber as you would've gotten with Google Fiber around.
I have gigabit internet and my house is wired for gig-e. But I agree, it is overkill. Even 4K streaming content is only 15Mbps and I’ve never seen anything in real life come to close to even 100Mbps except for the VPN to my job in the middle of the night, occasionally upload speeds to AWS, and when I’m uhh, downloading Linux ISO’s from bit torrents.
The only advantage I see of gigabit Internet is that it’s uncapped and I could easily host some side web projects from home.
> There is an assumption among folks in the tech community that there is no competition between providers serving different markets--i.e. what Verizon does in Maryland cannot affect what Comcast does in Delaware.
Grass-is-greener effect is real. While there may be no competition to spur changes, other things might such as PR and loyalty when facing potential future competition (i.e. in a more competitive future or just by people moving). If the marketing efforts are any measure, customer retention during a move is a big target.
We should realize that they compete for mindshare locally and regionally and there are overlaps, even if they don't affect decisions as significantly as direct competition would.
Comcast may have little incentive in a remote city to make these changes, but if Comcast even believes that Google Fiber may be looking to expand to one of its areas, it is in Comcast's best interest to preemptively improve service in that area.
Preemptive retention is much less costly than having to reacquire customers after they've switched to Google Fiber.
There are hundreds of small regional and muni broadband companies popping up deploying fiber networks. In my area I know of a couple of smaller ISP that only service my state
This on of the reasons Verizon and ATT are moving to improve their services, not Google Fiber
Google Fiber proved there was a demand for faster fiber based wireline services in an era where companies like ATT and Verizon were saying wireline service was dead and the future was 100% wireless...
But like the false narrative of the PC being dead and all computing will be 100% on 5in mobile phone, the idea that wireless will ever replace wired services is pipe dream in the mind of Verizon's CEO
Verizon or any other ILEC rolling out last mile fiber also removes them from antitrust restrictions on traditional copper, so viewing such actions as 'competitive' in nature should not be assumed.
Google Fiber is still being built in Huntsville, AL. It straight up made Comcast, WOW, and AT&T all start rolling out gigabit. The only other local provider, Mediacom, had already begun rolling out gigabit before Google even announced its plans for the area.
It's funny how regional this is, even only looking at major cities. In my part of Los Angeles, you can't get a residential line with more than 20Mbps up for any money.
I mean, it is likely just access to deploy the new wires. LA is far larger and likely has much more cost/hoops to jump through for companies to deploy anything. Ex: "No deploying new fiber unless you do it to the entire area simultaneously, also you must use this labor to do it, coordinate with this many more entities while working in the areas" etc compared to sparser and generally business-friendlier Southern/Midwest Cities
Yes, and I recently had an AT&T fiber line installed in my house because of it. I'm 100% certain that if Google Fiber hadn't started deployments in Louisville I would not have a fiber connection today. Even if it's not from Google.
That is indeed why I left Google, but that was almost two years ago at this point. Last I heard they changed their mind and are starting things back up with brand new people.
Being an ISP is just too appealing a business model. It's 95% profit once you've paid off the loans for the infrastructure. And when you're Google, you don't need loans.
> It's 95% profit once you've paid off the loans for the infrastructure.
This is FUD, and it doesn't even pass the smell test.[1] Maintaining broadband infrastructure is incredibly labor intensive (and the required labor is high-skill and often unionized). To use Chattanooga's EBP as an uncontroversial example: https://static.epb.com/annual-reports/2017/media/EPB_2017_Fi.... In FY 2017, it's fiber optic division had revenues of $150 million and expenses of $122 million (not including interest on the underlying fiber optic system, which it looks like is accounted for on the electricity side of the business). That's an operating profit margin of about 20%,[1] which is actually pretty good. Verizon's wireline division in most years has an operating profit margin of under 5%. (EBP, being in a right-to-work southern state, almost certainly has lower labor expenses than Verizon, with its primarily north-east footprint.)
[1] And that's before taxes. A telco can't pull a double Irish with a Dutch sandwich because all its revenues and expenses are domestic. Verizon's effective income tax rate prior to the Trump cuts was 34%: https://247wallst.com/telecom-wireless/2018/01/23/verizon-ea....
you're right. they're not significantly expanding. i don't think it was really paying off in any useful way.
The rule change won't necessarily spur more Google Fiber deployment, since the ISP has other financial problems and has largely stopped expansion of fiber into new cities.
I wonder if Google could pivot to offering legal services for establishing municipal broadband. There has to be some way they can recoup the costs by acting as the legal 'spear' for cities that are unaware of how to offer greater competition and allow smaller ISPs in (if not acting as their own).
Google grew up in a services era by replacing a hugely human intensive service with an algorithm.
Navigating local laws might be doable with their current expertise, but would definitely be human intensive, absent a real breakthrough in AI.
OTOH, there is that automated portal to fight traffic tickets. I wonder if Google tried to automate and A/B test more complicated court or municipal filings how it would do in the long run.
In Austin, at least, though we might be among the last. In February of 2017, they microtrenched our streets and installed fiber. On Tuesday of this week, they put up No Parking signs on the street again, ostensibly to do whatever else they need to actually bring us live.
Republicans simply have a different utility function. They consider deregulation, and ease of running a business more important than enforcing fairness via legislation.
They believe the market will do a better job than they can do. Democrats don't trust the market to do that, and feel they can do a better job.
The Republican political identity is no longer that of small, limited government and free market policies (see: massive tarrifs and bailouts of the affected domestic industries to win votes).
One could argue that the reason that tariffs are necessary is because we do not have an economy purely dictated by the free market, which in this particular case is probably not a bad thing. A big reason China is able to flood the US with a trade surplus is because they have a different view on the value of humanity. For instance workers in China, in some cases, work in something that's not that far off from slave-like conditions. $1000 iPhones are manufactured by the millions by people earning a few bucks a day, living in on-site dormitories, in buildings surrounded by 'suicide nets' to try to stop impulsive suicide from workers.
In the US we would never tolerate such conditions and it would be legally impossible on a large number of levels, the least of which not also being our minimum wage. While I think this is probably the right way to go, it also means that our taking the higher moral ground there means that we're severely hurting domestic producers by making it literally impossible for them to compete with the prices that they can produce things for. By not relying entirely on market forces we've crippled our ability to compete.
In a world where politics, on both the right and left, was not dictated by business interests there would be bipartisan support to let's say "adjust" our relations with China on this front. It's reminiscent of the times past when countries would speak out against slavery and then buy the dirt cheap American cotton and tobacco by the ton. We believe workers have the right to certain reasonable working conditions and in the process of doing so end up massively cutting employment in our nation and then shipping trillions of dollars to nations with no such concerns. It's hardly logical regardless of your political leaning.
Unfortunately we have no alternatives to choose candidates from that understand neither extremes will work, and that you actually need a mixture of legislation/regulation in the right places, and no legistlation/regulation in others.
I was using an absolute scale, and yes, frankly the democrats are a bit right of center.
I mean if you declare the electorate the spectrum, then nothing means anything, because its all a completely meaningless fluid definition which has no basis in actual reality.
To the contrary, there is broad consensus and what people are all arguing about is actually the mushy middle. The Republicans won on this one--the 1996 telecom act broadly deregulated the telecom industry. Most of Europe followed suit and deregulated their telecom markets similar to how we did it in the 1996 act.
What republicans are worried about is attempts to undo the 1996 reforms. There are people who think that rate regulation, municipal utility boards deciding where infrastructure should be built, etc., are actually good ideas. Probably not a majority of people even in the democrat camp, but there are enough people who don't remember why the 1996 act was a good idea that it makes republicans nervous.
> Most of Europe followed suit and deregulated their telecom markets similar to how we did it in the 1996 act.
But one big problem with "attempts to undo the 1996 reforms" is that Europe kept (and expanded) linesharing and unbundled network element rules; the United States threw out most mandatory UNE rules and never expanded them to include companies operating networks over coax or new-build fiber optic networks.
So now we have this farce where, in some areas, people served by DSL have the choice of several (slow) ISPs because the copper is still technically, kinda unbundled. But if you can't get DSL or can't get a sufficiently fast speed, your sole choice is likely your monopoly cable provider.
Most large European countries didn't expand unbundling to include cable and fiber either: https://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf. None of the five largest EU countries (which comprise the majority of the EU population), applied unbundling to coax. Most don't apply unbundling to fiber either.
U.S. copper unbundling rules are weaker than the U.S., but copper is also largely irrelevant in the U.S., because most broadband is over cable or fiber. Unbundling matters more in Europe, but primarily because DSL is much more common in Europe.
The problem as I understand it is that deregulation helps a lot in situations where a compelling business case exists for companies to expand/compete, and it hurts a lot where said business case does not exist.
As it so happens, crowded urban centers, where a single cell tower or fiber-optic network can serve thousands of paying customers, benefit a great deal from deregulation. Sparsely populated rural areas, however, where "last mile" really means "last 30 miles", get screwed over by deregulation since companies have minimal incentive to expand if it only means 10 new paying members.
I'm not saying either extreme is perfect -- indeed, deregulation likely helps more than it hurts given increasing population density in U.S. cities -- but it seems to me that there are advantages to both sides of the equation.
> The Republicans won on this one--the 1996 telecom act broadly deregulated the telecom industry. Most of Europe followed suit and deregulated their telecom markets similar to how we did it in the 1996 act.
Seems Europeans consumers have reaped massive benefits since then:
At least where I live we now have fast Internet access, calls and sms cost nothing (theoretically speaking we get n free minutes and sms, but I never used more in the last few years) and data is cheap.
Not saying this is all because of the deregulation but I think it helped.
IMHO, the United States lacks a true left wing party and the Democrats are the party of moderate regulation/legislation (which is unfortunate for a number of reasons).
That's why you make the parties fight. Like have the house and the senate controlled by different parties, or the president and the legislature different parties, etc, etc.
While compromising may have worked in the past, each year brings a more polarized situation where each party is less willing to compromise.
> Like have the house and the senate controlled by different parties, or the president and the legislature different parties, etc, etc.
This two party system makes it too easy for one party to control all 3 branches (like now..). Having a true multiparty system (>2, preferably more) forces compromise, because you wouldn't have a government without it.
One can point to the 24-hour cycle media viciously vying for eyeballs, and the litany of pseudo-news outlets that have gained widespread audiences and which peddle in division for a major portion of the cause. The electorate are being manipulated by our own. Unless the media on all sides walk back the rhetoric it will only get worse in the years to come.
None of those are natural monopolies. Every human could easily switch from Facebook to any competitor right now. The same is not true of cable, ISPs, electricity, gas, etc.
You can switch from Facebook, but since the value of Facebook is derived entirely from connecting to other people on it, any such switch would be utterly useless unless the people you want to interact with also switch.
The result is that a sufficiently large social network is, effectively, a natural monopoly. Which is exactly why no-one has managed to dethrone Facebook yet, not even by throwing lots of money at a better alternative (like G+).
No one has managed to dethrone Facebook because the CFAA allows private companies like Facebook to stop anyone who'd actually provide the facilities to allow for a smooth transition. BigCos like Facebook and Google lean on the aggressive monopoly-making powers of the CFAA every day. Look up the dockets and you'll see the companies making active use of these powers.
In particular, check out Facebook v. Power Ventures, where an entrepreneur was left owing $3M in damages to Facebook for allowing users to extract only their own information.
Underpinning all digital "monopolies" is copyright law, which is eminently changeable. It really pets my peeves when people suggest things like streaming services are natural monopolies as if there is nothing that can be done about it.
Copyright was invented because since the printing press, intellectual goods are so easy to copy that it'd be impossible to sell them at scale without state-enforced supply ceilings (aka copyright).
Doesn't sound like a "natural monopoly" to me. It's wholly artificial and we could change it if we wanted.
What mechanism does deregulation introduce that leads to monopolization? The opposite is the truth. The most regulated markets are the least competitive. More than anything else, regulations are barriers to companies that want to enter markets.
This is demonstrably false. Tariffs are are one of the least pro-business legislative tools. Businesses and sometimes whole industries can evaporate when costs increase by 25% overnight.
Pai worked at Verizon from February 2001 to April 2003 when he was four years out of law school. What evidence do you have that Verizon are his 'paymasters'?
It really isn't. It gives competitors ability to take you down at whim with no control.
The right compromise is forced time horizons which are reasonable, and parallel execution, with significant penalties. Natural monopolies are a huge problem that does need regulation, but this goes to far for me to be comfortable with, and I worked at independent ISPs for like 10 years.
The new admin has a libertarian streak. They don't like unnecessary regulation in general and that's a good thing.
Of course, when that means giving the Comcasts of the world headaches, HW cheers, but when that means good riddance to net neutrality (or rather letting states decide), everyone here screams bloody murder.
No, that isn't double standards. Why would you think it is? Do you think the rule can only be either "regulations are good" or "regulations are bad"?
It's not. The idea of regulations is neither good nor bad - you have to consider them on a case-by-case basis. You especially have to consider the results.
Unnecessary regulations are, by definition, bad, since they have cost without benefit. We're not arguing the semantics of the word here - I think it is clear that the people you refer to think net neutrality regulation is both necessary and good.
> FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected this argument, saying that startups are unnecessarily delayed when they have to wait for incumbent ISPs before hanging wires.
This does seem very 180 degree different than his stance on net neutrality. The tin foil hat wearing side of me says that Google's donations must have been larger than Comcast's. The real world side of me can't figure out how somebody can logically justify these two opposing views.
In a framework of deregulation, there is no 180 here. He is simply following through on general smaller government principles. When we removed net neutrality, the fear was the monopolies will rule us all! Well, how do those monopolies stay in power? Typically, corrupt regulation such as what was removed here.
Fwiw I live in a country with no net neutrality laws but reasonably healthy competition between ISPs (New Zealand) and it seems to work out alright.
I feel like the right order of operations if you did believe in deregulation and encouraging competition would be to ensure there was competition between ISPs and then remove the net neutrality laws though, not the other way around.
I still think internet access should be treated similarly to water/power etc though.
> I live in a country with no net neutrality laws but reasonably healthy competition between ISPs (New Zealand) and it seems to work out alright.
New Zealand doesn't need net neutrality, because it has something better.
In the US, the ISP is one company that owns the lines and sells its services to customers. They also typically bundle cable tv packages. Many customers are serviced by only one or two ISPs. Setting up a competing ISPs requires laying new cable/fiber.
In New Zealand, the ISPs and the companies which own the lines are different companies (as enforced by regulations). ComCom also regulates the price that the line company can charge the ISP.
This makes setting up a competing ISP easy.
Buy some capacity on international fiber links, set up some routing equipment in a peering exchange and contract Chorus/Enable to hook up your customers.
Incidentally, this is how power companies work in NZ too. There have been quite a few new retail power competitors launched over the last 10 years.
In New Zealand all the copper and fibre is owned by a regulated wholesale monopoly, that isn’t legally allowed to sell directly to consumers. ISPs buy access at regulated prices.
Net neutrality, with respect to content, isn’t really an issue, since 99.9% of content is made overseas.
My anecdote is similar, re healthy competition. It's even less regulated here in Thailand, which is good for competition and consumers, but does lead to messes like this https://www.bangkokpost.com/media/content/dcx/2016/06/30/184... where a dozen or more telecommunication providers each hang their own cabling. The posts actually collapse sometimes due to the weight of the cabling.
Exactly. "A gift was made to xxx in your name". A bag with large $$$ printed on the side being handed over is just for the comics. In the real world, "donations" is just a word with multiple meanings.
In the case of executive agencies like this, usually it's the revolving door effect. Such as Joshua Wright's cushy job with one of Google's law firms after his tenure as the FCC Commissioner. You guarantee that if someone takes care of X issue for you, they'll get a really high paying job with almost no actual work involved when you leave.
I believe the theoretical arguments against net neutrality are actually extremely sound. Prioritized traffic could solve some significant network issues. Realistically, we know it will be abused.
Net neutrality was in place for all of five minutes.
Keeping it or removing it won't do anything to spur connection competition.
There are three options.
1. Technology inflection forces greater competition, such as Starlink or 5G. 1a would be that an extremely deep pocket competitor forces some improvement; that works at least temporarily, however I'm skeptical that's sustainable (as witnessed by Google's pull-back).
2. The government makes smart decisions regulation wise, that help to smooth a path for increased competition. That includes things like one touch make ready, dig once fiber rules, and blocking munis from signing cable/etc monopoly agreements.
3. Nationalize the infrastructure and allow anyone to rent it. That's too far fetched (unrealistic) for the US as a mostly market system, to go that direction from a heavily privatized market. 3a would be, pass a law stipulating that muni broadband can't be impeded, if a city or town wants to set up its own network it's legally entitled to attempt it. Every bit of added competition around the country helps.
Any combination of those is a big assist. The US is a top 15 broadband country currently, and most of the nations in front of it are tiny (except Japan and South Korea, both of which have hyper population concentration in just a few cities). We've made tremendous progress from how far we were lagging behind just six or seven years ago. Keep throwing more of the above onto that momentum, and it will keep the US competitive in that top echelon, which is a great outcome. Any time a country the size of the US (not just eg a state like Massachusetts) can keep up with countries like Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Sweden on broadband, or any infrastructure frankly, it's a big deal.
You can still dislike him because of his personality (a regulator with a trollish personality). That doesn't mean you will never agree with his policy prescriptions.
Also, I realize your comment was probably some combination of jest or sarcasm.
This is bad. I love google fiber and see that what they are trying to do is valid but when one utility company touches another company's facilities it compromises the other facility and makes it vulnerable for service disruption.
But the regulation to ban or allow should not come at the Federal level. It should be governed by the utility pole owner.
In NYC for example con Ed owns a large number of poles. And then Verizon owns the next number of poles. Verizon and other utility companies pay ConEd based on how high their utility is placed. If it's a Verizon pole, Verizon will put their facility on the very top and spectrum will put their facility on the lower part.
This means that another utility company cannot just come and move someone else's facility around.
On the flip side, that means there's nothing to stop the pole owner from delaying, as (if I understand correctly) Google argued was happening here. Sure, you could try to fine uncooperative owners, but the delay will kill small ISPs who can't afford to wait; the potential fine would have to massive to deter such behavior, and between lobbying and general antipathy toward regulation, that size of fine would likely never occur.
I don't disagree though that there should be some form of middle ground (which it seems Pai was trying to find) -- I'm just unsure what it would be.
I understand where you are coming from, but you must be blind to think that the biggest issue facing the American telecom industry is service disruption due to competitors having too much access to the utility poles. While you are right that this does create a bigger opportunity for small service disruptions, the bigger issue is that even when its not disrupted service in many area's is horrible, and expensive. While a private company might have paid to put the poles in they should be treated like the shared limited resource that they are, and there should be universally accepted rules on how the current "owner" has to allow other to access it.
I will go so far as to say there is not a single citizen who will have a net negative result of this ruling.
And then you'll have beautiful cities with nice streetscapes.
Seriously, if you don't want your street corners to look like a black deathball or [something straight out of Stranger Things][1], you need to consider those poles as "shared limited resource".
You can’t have everything. People crow about how Japan has fast fiber and why can’t we have it too. Have you ever seen Tokyo? There are above ground electric lines and cables everywhere. This is right downtown: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7001104,139.7314866,3a,75y,1.... There’s a reason why Google targeted Fiber in places like Kansas City first—few dense American cities habe above ground utilities, primarily due to aesthetic concerns.
It's an oversimplification, sure, but the reality is: Most of the poles being fought over are a given company's actual property that they built and have to maintain, and they are entirely right in trying to defend them from a competitor paying government officials to pass laws granting them the ability to tamper with another company's property and disrupt their services.
Furthermore, the government isn't paying them for these poles in this case, they're forcing a company to allow it's competitors to tamper with and likely disrupt their customer's service. If the government wants to nationalize "the infrastructure", I'm all for it, but then they'd be paying out a lot of money to buy this equipment from the companies that actually own it.
As someone really annoyed when my Internet drops out in the middle of a game, I'm drastically opposed to these sorts of hijinks, I don't need my ISP's competitor taking out my lines at the same time as sending me mailers about how their service is so much more reliable.
>>Furthermore, the government isn't paying them for these poles in this case,
ohhh yes they are... They are allowing these companies free use the land those poles are sunk into free of charge from which they force the owners of said properly to allow them to use under the Utility Easement programs.
In most instances the government is also giving them some kind of Monopolistic control over the market segment they service. i.e there is only 1 Telephone Provider, or 1 Electrical Company for that area. In exchange for these FREE things the government requires these companies to SELL attachments to their poles at a reasonable fee. I.e when Comcast wants to connect to a Electrical Pole they pay a monthly FEE to the utility companies
To believe the utility companies some how being harmed just does not match reality
I agree that it makes it vulnerable to service disruption, but mostly in the opposite of the way you're suggesting.
When I lived in Baltimore, it was a well-known problem among all the ISPs I asked for DSL service that, while you needed a Verizon tech to interact with their lines from the pole even if you were using another ISP, the Verizon techs would often outright not show up without notice and leave the ISP's techs sitting there, apologetic and unable to do anything.
After trying this with 3 different DSL ISPs (and multiple attempted appointments per ISP), I concluded that it was unlikely all 3 of them were telling the same lie.
I've known people who've worked within telecom sales. Employees of any area's dominant phone company are specifically trained to call their control of the lines out as a benefit of not using one of the smaller competitors to whom they're legally obligated to sell space. It becomes part of their pitch. Something to the effect of "Use [AT&T/Sprint/whomever] because we control the lines and our jobs always get done -- other jobs, maybe not so much." is frequently heard.
Not an issue. It doesn’t supercede states with their own laws. From the article:
The FCC rules also don't apply in states that have opted out of the federal regime in order to use their own methods of regulating pole attachments. Twenty states and Washington, DC, have previously opted out of the federal pole-attachment rules, while pole attachments in the other 30 states are governed by FCC rules.
The administration continues to act in removing Federal jurisdiction and regulations from being used as a tool to prevent startup organizations from entering established markets.
This case is a success in that it removes significant incumbent advantages. Let's hope poor behavior and sloppy work (breaking connections too frequently) doesn't become common. And shame on the incumbents using regulations for financial gain.