Comment Re:Municipal Broadband (Score 1) 688
As someone who once worked for a rural electric cooperative, a municipal or coop utility has serious problems operating in this country.
Every time a section of our territory became populated enough to turn a profit for the Investor Owned Utility (IOU) next door, they went to the utilities commission at the state level and annexed that territory. We were turning a profit overall and paying that profit back to the customers, while charging them a lower rate and giving them as good or better service - but we were only supposed to serve areas that the IOU wasn't willing to provide power to.
The one municipal power utility in the area also was better and cheaper. We were all buying our power from the same source at the same price - just the IOU had stockholders who demanded high profits.
If your municipal ISP does really well, I'm glad. Most city councils will decide that they should just let capitalism run its course, especially if they want the big ISP to keep sponsoring their labor day parade/new stadium/vacation home for the mayor. The investor-owned ISP could also sue for "non-competitive behavior" due to underpricing, "government subsidies" because the ISP benefits from the overall city infrastructure, or lobby at the state level to make municipal ISPs illegal; IOU's have done both successfully in the past to municipal utilities.
Every time a section of our territory became populated enough to turn a profit for the Investor Owned Utility (IOU) next door, they went to the utilities commission at the state level and annexed that territory. We were turning a profit overall and paying that profit back to the customers, while charging them a lower rate and giving them as good or better service - but we were only supposed to serve areas that the IOU wasn't willing to provide power to.
The one municipal power utility in the area also was better and cheaper. We were all buying our power from the same source at the same price - just the IOU had stockholders who demanded high profits.
If your municipal ISP does really well, I'm glad. Most city councils will decide that they should just let capitalism run its course, especially if they want the big ISP to keep sponsoring their labor day parade/new stadium/vacation home for the mayor. The investor-owned ISP could also sue for "non-competitive behavior" due to underpricing, "government subsidies" because the ISP benefits from the overall city infrastructure, or lobby at the state level to make municipal ISPs illegal; IOU's have done both successfully in the past to municipal utilities.