Internet service franchises offer local governments potential work around to incumbent-sponsored state video franchises

Mediacom questions Iowa City deal with ImOn | The Gazette: Jeff Janssen, vice president of sales and marketing with ImOn Communications, said Tuesday he had not seen the Mediacom letter, but said ImOn has lease agreements similar those with Iowa City in other communities like Hiawatha and Marion.

Janssen also noted a franchise agreement only becomes required when cable TV is added to the list of service offerings. ImOn’s current plans for Iowa City are strictly for telephone and Internet services, he said.

“Franchise agreements are all around cable TV,” he said. “Once we decide, or if we decided to offer cable TV in Iowa City, we would get that franchise agreement, we are required to.”

This issue was bound to emerge sooner or later. In the early 2000s, legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies realized that with the emergence of the Internet and its capability to deliver TV programming, local governments would come under intense pressure from their constituents to require ISPs offering video services to provide Internet connections to all premises under municipal franchise agreements. That would have required substantial capital investment incompatible with the incumbents' business models based on milking their existing wireline "footprints" -- and not modernizing and expanding them to reach every doorstep.

To head off this prospect, the legacy incumbent cable and telephone company lobbies went into high gear to get state laws enacted putting states in charge of so-called "video franchises" and usurping local government authority over video services.

But that left a potential loophole for local governments to franchise Internet services other than video -- what's at issue in this Iowa case. Watch for this gambit to take off elsewhere, especially in states where there are also laws barring local governments from building and/or operating their own Internet services. Local governments could get around both restrictions by creating Internet service franchises and partnering with private ISPs as their franchisees. (Also referred to as "telecommunications franchises" in this item on a recent Brookings Institution panel discussion). They could also pressure the legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies by requiring them to obtain an Internet service franchise serving all premises if they wish to offer Internet services other than video within their jurisdictions.

With interest in wireline-delivered video declining among "cord cutting" consumers and incumbents relying more on Internet service for revenue, that pressure could be quite intense. It would also give localities a powerful tool to bring service to all of their residents and businesses given the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's lack of interest in enforcing its recently adopted rulemaking reclassifying Internet as a common carrier telecommunications service subject to the universal service and anti-redlining provisions of Title II of the Communications Act.

Gullible, disingenuous pols enact state video franchise schemes unlikely to lower cable rates

Gullible and intellectually dishonest politicians enacted so-called video franchise schemes in about a dozen states over the past few years pushed by big telcos like AT&T. They were gullible at best and disingenuous at worst because they parroted the telcos' party line that such regulatory "reforms" would enhance competition for video services by allowing telcos to compete with cable companies, resulting in lower prices for consumers.

Well surprise, surprise, surprise. Cable rates are headed up -- and not down -- despite the entry of telco TV offerings such as AT&T's U-Verse, according to this weekend item from the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal Sentinel. This week, the Federal Communications Commission launched an inquiry into cable rate increases in advance of next February's mandated cutover to all digital television broadcasting.

"On balance, the law hasn't been good for consumers but has been very good for the companies that wanted it," Barry Orton, a telecommunications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the newspaper. "Two years from now, I don't think you will be able to say that consumers saved a lot of money if any at all."

Telcos sugar coated their true agenda with the false patina of increased competition and lower rates for consumers. Their real goal was to get local governments that wanted them to build out their broadband infrastructures evenly to serve all and not just some of their residents off their backs. It's far easier to lobby a single state regulatory agency and influence the pols who appoint their members (and get them to put in place rules sanctioning broadband black holes) than to herd the political cats who sit on city and town councils and county boards of supervisors.