Mediacom Helps Keep Minnesota a Broadband Backwater > follow Kansas and Missouri

reply to Chubbysumo

Re: follow Kansas and Missouri

well, in the short term, it may not be much to spend, but with how much verizon claims to have spent on their FiOS buildout, all the money spent on lobbying over the past 10 to 15 years(and years into the future) could be spent and could have been spent on connecting lots of people with FTTH. Blame investors for that one, because all they care about is how many % of RoI that they can get.

The problem not only lies within the laws, but, you have to consider all the legal assaults that the current incumbents put out to try and stop them. Im sure lake county has met all the "requirements", except the current incumbent(frontier) has decided to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers instead of spending that on their slow crappy network to please the people. Instead of letting it go on, or invest in their own(frontiers) network to compete with the community initiave, they have hired lawyers and thrown dozens of lawsuits to try and outright stop the project. So, answer me this: If Frontier will not invest in the network, and the community decides to do it themselves, meets all the requirements, and has the laws on the books on their side, WHY DOES FRONTIER CONTIUNE TO WASTE OUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS by continuing their legal assault? If they arent going to invest, why should they have an interest in fighting the project? I dont believe that any incumbent who has forsaken an area has any right to file legal roadblocks to stop a community from picking up the slack where they wouldnt, but that is exactly what incumbents do.

So, look at it as a whole package. The incumbent buys a law, maybe a law that is not an outright ban, but they get one. Then, they stop investing in a communitys broadband and infrastructure starts to get worse or fail, yet the incumbent wont repair and replace it. The community as a whole decides to jump thru all the hoops to get their own broadband system going, they(the community) follows all the rules, laws, and comes up with private/public funding. The incumbent, fearing competition from better services, instead of trying to upgrade their own network to compete, instead launches a legal assault to drain the funds by forcing them(the community) to pay for lawyers, and thus, puts the project in the red before its off the ground. Then, they(the incumbent) puts out misleading adverts saying the project is bad, and that it will fail, and that its already losing money(which strokes the public fear button), and then the community effort dies from a combination of public fear mongering and legal assaults from the incumbents who refused to wire the community in the first place. Please tell me you feel that this is wrong. I dont think an incumbent has any right to file any objections to a community run project unless they can show they are investing to improve. It just comes down to greed. The investors fear the loss of an easy profit, and a really high profit margin. I say down with the stock market, and down with CEOs who earn many millions per year to basically do next to nothing but puppet out their boards decisions.

As an investor in VZ, ROI is obviously a big deal. But not all of us are so shortsighted that we're only looking to the next Q. After all, investing is about future earnings, so we definitely want to keep working towards that goal.

As for spending money on lobbyists instead of deploying fiber. Unless made illegal (why isn't lobbying at least capped? blame Congress ), companies will spend money on lobbying Congress. That expense is already allocated. If it didn't go toward lobbying, I doubt that it would be spent on deploying infrastructure. If anything, it would probably be returned to the shareholders.