Muni Fiber and Politics

Mon Jul 21 22:31:13 UTC 2014

On Jul 21, 2014, at 14:41 , Gary Buhrmaster <gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 8:34 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> .....
>> Whoever installs fiber first and gets any significant fraction of subscribers in any
>> but the densest of population centers is a competition killer, _IF_ you let them
>> parlay that physical infrastructure into an anti-competitive environment for higher
>> layer services.
> 
> I take it that on principal you would have petitioned against the
> proposed Google Fiber roll-out in the San Jose area and would
> have spoken out against it at the public hearing on June 17th
> in favor of an alternative municipal funded project if you were not
> otherwise engaged (the synopsis indicates no public comments
> from the floor from that meeting)?  You may have missed an
> opportunity to be the one to stop Google Fiber in San Jose in
> preference to muni fiber, although there is never just one meeting
> for such large scale projects.  I am sure you will have other
> chances to offer your opinion, and encourage the council to
> just say no.

Nope... I would strongly support it.

Why?

Because until we have regulation that does what I am proposing, we have ridiculous monopolies with all kinds of negative consumer impact. While Google as a new monopoly wouldn't be the ideal competitive environment, it would, at least, be better than what we have today.

While I believe, on principle that we need to move forward towards what I described above, I also recognize the reality on the ground and the need not to cut off one's nose to spite one's face.

Owen