> the competitive right to place your own facilities on telephone/power poles or underground in public right-of-way under the Telecommunications Act of 1996
This is not true. The FCC doesn't regulate the first pole attachment by a given attacher to poles owned by a given owner. The pole owners are basically free to use all sorts of lame reasons for refusing your first pole attachment request.
The FCC only gets involved when a company already has some (even just one) attachments and is getting rejected or stonewalled on making more attachments.
If you think about it, this is typical captured regulator behavior. The phone companies already have attachments to the electric utility's poles wherever they operate. So this lets the phone companies call in the FCC on any pole dispute. But it provides zero assistance to any new market entrants who want to compete with the existing phone company.
It also makes the decision to allow the first attachment a much harder decision for the pole owner, with the result being that the electrical utilities are incentivized to exclude new telecoms from competing with the phone company. But of course these new telecoms aren't trying to provide electrical services, so it doesn't look anticompetitive to a superficial analysis.
This is not true. The FCC doesn't regulate the first pole attachment by a given attacher to poles owned by a given owner. The pole owners are basically free to use all sorts of lame reasons for refusing your first pole attachment request.
The FCC only gets involved when a company already has some (even just one) attachments and is getting rejected or stonewalled on making more attachments.
If you think about it, this is typical captured regulator behavior. The phone companies already have attachments to the electric utility's poles wherever they operate. So this lets the phone companies call in the FCC on any pole dispute. But it provides zero assistance to any new market entrants who want to compete with the existing phone company.
It also makes the decision to allow the first attachment a much harder decision for the pole owner, with the result being that the electrical utilities are incentivized to exclude new telecoms from competing with the phone company. But of course these new telecoms aren't trying to provide electrical services, so it doesn't look anticompetitive to a superficial analysis.