Showing posts with label Christopher Mitchell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Mitchell. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Title II common carrier regulation would be problematic for Google Fiber

If the U.S. Federal Communications Commission takes President Obama's advice and decides to impose Title II Common Carrier regulation on the Internet (and thereby mandate Internet service providers serve all premises in their service areas), it would throw a monkey wrench not only in the business models of legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies that are based on serving only selected neighborhoods, but that of Google Fiber as well.

Christopher Mitchell of Institute for Local Self-Reliance opines in this piece on Google Fiber in The Kernel suggesting that Google's walled garden strategy is actually reinforcing the digital divide that plagues much of the United States.
“Google is popularizing the idea of building essential infrastructure with a market-driven approach. We don’t build roads like that—if we did, there’d be no roads in rural areas. We don’t build electricity like that—if we did, our economy could be far weaker. We recognize that those things are essential infrastructure.”

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

The case for overbuilding incumbent telcos and cablecos

Twentieth century, metal wire-based legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies naturally don’t like it when progress inevitably emerges in the form of 21st century fiber optic to the premise (FTTP) telecommunications infrastructure offering the proverbial better (and faster) mousetrap as well as protection against technological obsolescence. Particularly if they have opted not to construct it and someone else is planning to do so. Especially if the new fiber infrastructure benefits from government subsidies. No fair, incumbents protest. That’s government subsidized competition that picks winners and losers and we’ll lose.

That argument cuts both ways, asserts Christopher Mitchell of the Minnesota-based Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR), one of my favorite incumbent spin busters. Incumbents have benefitted from favorable governmental policies that have been in place for decades including the availability of high cost subsidies and public policy that permitted them to maintain a monopoly. Not allowing government subsidization of FTTP infrastructure built by non-incumbents in the footprints of the incumbents, Mitchell suggests, is a double standard.

Given that telecommunications infrastructure must be broadly dispersed in order to be economically viable and adhere to Metcalfe’s Law, Mitchell accurately notes FTTP infrastructure builders must be able overbuild outmoded incumbent infrastructure when they opt not to upgrade to FTTP -- and receive government subsidies for doing so if available. That’s eminently fair and good old American progress – the same progress that brought electricity to large swaths of the nation in the 1930s when market forces alone could not do so.

As for the incumbent argument they will come out losers, Mitchell observes incumbents have made losers out of nearly 20 million Americans who according to a 2012 Federal Communications Commission estimate live in neighborhoods incumbents redlined and declined any wireline premises Internet connectivity, leaving them to dialup and satellite.

Click here to hear Mitchell and ILSR colleague Lisa Gonzalez elaborate in a 13-minute podcast.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Recommended reading: "Breaking the Broadband Monopoly"

Just as bringing electric power to homes and farms was America's great infrastructure challenge in the early decades of the 20th century, building out telecommunications infrastructure is the challenge of the early 21st as FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has observed.

Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has issued a call for Americans rise to this new challenge just as they did in the 1930s with the Rural Electrification Administration and local utility cooperatives. While noting that every generation believes it bears a bigger burden than those before it, Mitchell asserts building out telecom infrastructure while difficult can be done just as it was with electric power lines.

Mitchell like author Jack Lessinger suggests this build out like electrification of nearly a century ago will help fuel an economic boom. (Building telecom infrastructure publicly and cooperatively also fits into Lessinger's emerging socioeconomic paradigm where "what's in it for me" is being supplanted by a new ethic of "what's in it for us.")

I strongly recommend reading Mitchell's latest white paper, Breaking the Broadband Monopoly. It's a comprehensive and very current treatise on and making the case for locally owned and operated telecom infrastructure. The paper is loaded with examples of community projects, examples of how legacy incumbent carriers fighting the future have attempted to stymie them, and tips and traps to avoid for community activists and local governments looking to take control of their telecommunications destiny and build their own local networks.