Lamenting the death of municipal franchising shows a basic failure to understand the economics of telecom. Municipal franchising is the worst of both worlds: all the downsides of creating local monopolies with none of the upsides of having a government-owned network.
If we want to build broadband to poor neighborhoods, we should just tax people and have to government build it. The municipal franchising model is an awful way of accomplishing that goal. In return for building broadband to poor neighborhoods (where most people can't afford it anyway), you basically kill competition. Nobody but the incumbent can make enough money in an environment where they have to build everywhere in order to receive permission to build anywhere. And it basically bans "MVP" models of deployment, where a provider starts in a focused area with demonstrated demand and expands gradually.
Things are more complex than this. If your view of humanity includes making sure people have something to eat, somewhere to sleep, and don't die from simple preventable medical issues, some amount of investment is a net positive.
Instead of just providing food, shelter, and basic medical care - helping them to get a job turns them into tax providers rather than consumers. Helping them to eat and live healthier reduce the medical cost.
We have this retoric in Denmark in the current political climate. It only works to a certain degree, but the liberals have this wet dream where everybody becomes contributing citizens if we just take away everything and threathen their existens. It just doesn't work that way for everybody.
"Ok fine, we will just deploy municipal broadband in our community and pay for it ourself."
...and watch AT&T lobbyists start crying and screaming about the "unfair" competition from local governments. Rememeber, government is good when it helps the rich, but bad when it helps the poor!
It isn't so easy to build and maintain a utility. Esp when you're the government and have to deal with unions (alongside fair wages, acceptable working conditions), there are ongoing costs that we need to pay somehow.
Another commenter complained how it would raise taxes on the middle class. I wanted to disagree but can't because the upper middle class has its tax credits/deductions and the upper class has even better loopholes leaving the rest of the middle class to pick up the tab.
Money is a difficult topic. Looking at Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri hand out tax breaks to attract businesses to come to their side of town. Can we put a tax on the national level? Then we need to distribute the money and it gets messy.
Well, yes, maintaining a utility is difficult, but it's also quite doable in many locations around the US where municipal fiber is present and running pretty peachy. I lived in Tacoma, south of Seattle, for a bit, and the municipal broadband there was pretty darn good in all aspects. Set up, config, cost, billing, and discontinuation when I left was incredibly simple, speeds were comparable to Comcast wired households, and honestly, it was just a great experience all around. I never heard a peep from them for anything besides when there were large issues or outages they needed to report.
While I dislike Comcast, AT&T, and their contemporaries as much as the next person, I don't really have a horror story of my own with them; I just greatly preferred the service and support for a home-grown ISP instead of having the looming threat of bandwidth caps or other such changes over my head for time to come.
Municipal broadband is VERY easily doable and a great solution for many places where the incumbents refuse to meet the needs of the taxpayers that are subsidizing the networks. Having internet as a public utility resulted in some really great service and a fantastic product.
Is this even news? If they thought there was a profit to be made by offering them upgrades, they would do it. They haven't, so you can probably assume that there is no profit in doing so. Last I checked, AT&T was not a charity and does not have an obligation to give people things at cost. This isn't discrimination, it's business. Nobody has a right to a fast internet connection.
That would be all well and good if they didn't collude with the local authorities against competition and collect "universal service" funds from the government in exchange for, at most, the barest minimum effort. Either be a benevolent monopoly (no such thing IMHO) or compete in a free market.
That's a separate issue though, and something I am quite strongly against. The article was about "discriminating" specifically against the poor, and unless you'd like to argue that their collusion is willfully and knowingly done specifically to discriminate against poor people, I don't think it applies.
I agree that we shouldn't be too quick to label every potentially unfair situation as discrimination. But part of the original intent (Ajit Pai notwithstanding) of the USF was to bring quality service to rural and low income areas, so AT&T should be careful to fulfill their obligation and, ideally, the government should hold them to it.
Whatever money AT&T receives from the USF almost certainly doesn't compensate for the revenue loss caused by putting an 18% extra tax on AT&T's products (which is how the USF is funded--an excise tax on the telecom industry).
How about all the other subsidies we've given to telecoms companies over the past few decades in return for unfulfilled promises that the money would be used to expand and upgrade networks?
If we want to build broadband to poor neighborhoods, we should just tax people and have to government build it. The municipal franchising model is an awful way of accomplishing that goal. In return for building broadband to poor neighborhoods (where most people can't afford it anyway), you basically kill competition. Nobody but the incumbent can make enough money in an environment where they have to build everywhere in order to receive permission to build anywhere. And it basically bans "MVP" models of deployment, where a provider starts in a focused area with demonstrated demand and expands gradually.