Looking at the NoGovInternet site [1] mentioned in the article, their arguments against municipal broadband seem to mostly revolve around financial sustainability. They cite a paper that claims that 90% of such efforts fail to generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining.
To me that seems like a strange argument against a municipal service. Surely no one expects other things like road maintenance to be financially self-sustaining?
That 90% figure is suspect as well, since it's including the initial buildout costs of young projects in the financial calculation. So the authors don't consider it "sustainable" until the buildout costs are fully paid off. It's considered a failure if they took out a loan to build out the network.
In this case also if it's losing money because private broadband providers dropped their prices that's still a win for the municipality. If it's losing money and prices didn't become more competitive then I would say it was just a bad idea overall.
even if prices don't drop to be competitive, service quality could be raised to stay competitive, but that's hard to measure aside from actual increase in bandwidth.
Even if neither of those are true, there's still value in a municipality not relying on potentially a single company for something as important as internet. But that's admittedly a harder sell.
Well in that case you're taxing people who don't use it to pay for it. If it can't get enough people wanting to use it at what it costs to run, I can see that as a good argument it shouldn't exist. (Though obviously I would take that data with a pile of salt.)
Do you benefit if you don't use a government service but your neighbors do?
You benefit if the local businesses have reasonably priced Internet, rather than paying hundreds of dollars a month for "commercial" services from incumbents. You benefit if your neighbor's kids have access to better education because those kids are the ones that are going to provide essential services to you as you age. And so on.
Everybody benefits from infrastructure even if they don't use it directly.
P.S. Yes in this case your benefits aren't large, but (1) your costs are small because internet is a paid service so the vast majority of the costs are covered by those who directly benefit and (2) infrastructure is cumulative -- the benefit of public infrastructure is greater than the sum of the parts.
> Everybody benefits from infrastructure even if they don't use it directly.
...therefore, by definition, any infrastructure project is to be considered "worth it" and should be welcomed by everyone in the community. To be against government rollout of infrastructure is to be against everybody's best interest, right?
I'm not against government-provided services across-the-board. But apologists for infrastructure spending often seem to make this argument as if it's the last point to be made. The great thing about a private company "overcharging" or "underserving" a community is that citizens aren't forced to be in a relationship with that company for their services. That's not the case for infrastructure spending by the local government. It's much harder to vote with your feet than to vote with your wallet.
The fine line to walk with government spending is to find a way to incentivize competition in the local marketplace, without destroying it in the process. It's not an easy problem to solve.
> The great thing about a private company "overcharging" or "underserving" a community is that citizens aren't forced to be in a relationship with that company for their services.
But that is rarely true for any privatized infrastructure alternative. There is often direct financial relations through taxation anyways, either tax breaks for the company or outright having the municipality foot the bill(see most stadiums)
Then there is the potential resource usage itself - e.g how much of the land in that city is now dedicate to toll roads that could be free, or in the internet infra case it's often exclusive rights to the poles all of the lines are ran on.
> But that is rarely true for any privatized infrastructure alternative. There is often direct financial relations through taxation anyways, either tax breaks for the company or outright having the municipality foot the bill(see most stadiums)
How would you consider those to be "privatized infrastructure alternatives" then? To me this sounds like further evidence of citizens having fewer alternatives available because their money is being spent on things they may not (or may!) care about.
> Then there is the potential resource usage itself - e.g how much of the land in that city is now dedicate to toll roads that could be free, or in the internet infra case it's often exclusive rights to the poles all of the lines are ran on.
IDK, public rights-of-way don't seem to be the place where big disagreements are found? Passing a local law to allow common access to utility infrastructure seems qualitatively different than establishing a municipal competitor.
> The great thing about a private company "overcharging" or "underserving" a community is that citizens aren't forced to be in a relationship with that company for their services.
This is a hilarious thing to say about broadband, where the incumbents go to great lengths not to compete by carving out markets onto monopolized checkerboxes where customers are forced to use one ISP if they want anything meeting the FCCs definition of broadband, and their neighbor across the street (or next apartment building) has to choose another monopolist ISP on their block.
You can be broadly for cities rolling out their own broadbands while still pointing out that on the long term your local government growing its spending can be an issue.
10Gbps is absolutely great, but then the city might create an entire bureaucratic structure around it and in 30 years when it's not great anymore the apparatus won't die or be displaced like a company eventually would.
Which is not to say that in this scenario this is not a bit of a farfetched scenario considering that's precisely what the incumbents are doing as you pointed out.
> 10Gbps is absolutely great, but then the city might create an entire bureaucratic structure around it and in 30 years when it's not great anymore the apparatus won't die or be displaced like a company eventually would
I would fully agree with you if there was actual competition. As it is, I have no faith that terrible internet companies - especially monopolies - are guaranteed to be replaced by better ones (see Ma Bells offsprings/reconstitution).
My ideal scenario is that cities lay down the last-mile fiber and handle physical layer connectivity issues between homes/offices and an exchange (for a fee). ISPs would provide Internet connectivity, that way, you get actual competition, and the cities stick to their core competency: infrastructure.
This is all great to discuss in theory but let's be real here. A municipal ISP is a net win for the people that pay for it.
This shouldn't be controversial, and it isn't controversial for people in places where discourse hasn't been poisoned with these go no where derailing talking points.
I couldn't be talking from a more realistic standpoint. I've lived in places where incumbent ISPs don't invest in infrastructure, places where a private organization built out a cable network without any subsidies, places where a municipal provider was subsidized by federal grant money, and places where there was no public or private build outs and so I built my own ISP servicing my rural neighbors.
I'm not saying that municipal broadband is a net loss, but there are no silver bullets. Subsidies are one way that a municipality can "pick a winner", and in so doing, it can assure all of the competition loses. Sometimes that's a net win, sometimes it isn't, your claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
With regards to broadband, this is already a solved problem: build open access networks.
It is a very straightforward way for municipalities to incentivize and create competition.
As to other infrastructure projects, there are ways of calculating the public benefit to determine whether the project has positive ROI, even if no direct payments are made by the public.
>Well in that case you're taxing people who don't use it to pay for it.
This is what I jokingly call the Libertarian's Lament: anything I don't use is a waste of money.
>If it can't get enough people wanting to use it at what it costs to run, I can see that as a good argument it shouldn't exist
Government services are not meant to run at a profit, which I think is the crux of the argument from private service providers: "We can't compete with someone who doesn't run for a profit, because it leaves us no room for a margin." Which is true. Then again I'm glad no one is trying to supply me water or sewer services at a profit and personally think privatizing electric service was a mistake. So from my perspective it's preferable to have a utility ISP.
I'm guessing you're talking about taxing businesses or products / services instead. That strikes me as a weird argument. Ultimately, all taxes are taxes on the labor of individual humans. "Corporate money" mostly isn't: if you tax it, you either pay as an employee or as a consumer. There are some populist arguments about executive compensation, but if nothing else, executives are still "individual taxpayers", right?
Businesses have to pay for a lot of things that consumers don't - business licenses, permits, etc. Any of those things can be a source of revenue to make up the shortfall.
By that logic should corporations get a tax break because a corporation isn't going to be using the public library given that it's a legal fiction?
Of course not, but the real objection is "it doesn't put money in my pocket" and they can't say that. The point of saying this instead is to make it just a little bit harder to debunk. Attention is a scarce resource, so that's enough to push it through.
There might be some "good arguments" against increasing broadband competition through government action, but we all know the incumbents aren't funding these sites for love of a good debate.
If you go down the rabbit-hole for any government funded service, you will find an opposition group. Politics abhors a vacuum. It doesn't mean they are well organized or funded.
> To me that seems like a strange argument against a municipal service. Surely no one expects other things like road maintenance to be financially self-sustaining?
A service that charges money and is meant to compete with private companies should do so on even grounds lest it just becomes a de-facto government monopoly. That's fine if that's the goal but, in that case, it shouldn't be charging money at all and should just be providing the service by default.
Operating at a middle ground where it's subsidized by government funding but isn't providing service to everyone but is available to everyone isn't a logical place to be.
The reason why the argument against municipal service's financial sustainability makes sense is because it's often sold to and voted on by the population it serves as being solvent.
There are three situations that make sense to me for municipal broadband.
1. Charge a fee and operate without government funding, similar to a non-profit but government run. Probably with an exception for expanding the network to cover the entire municipality but, once that's complete, maintenance should be sustained by the program. Essentially, providing at-cost broadband and subsidizing accessibility.
2. Broadband-for-all. Government provides broadband as a service, provided free of charge to the end user and funded by taxpayers.
3. In lieu of some kind of broadband subsidy gated to a limited population (low-income, most likely). Broadband-for-all... if you're poor.
Municipal broadband is usually proposed as and passed by voters as #1. The requirement for it to be self sustaining is to allow for competition in the market to still exist. After all, the problem we are trying to solve is created by the monopoly (duopoly if you consider DSL competitive to cable or have access to fiber) so replacing one monopoly with another is not seen as progress by many. #1 gets support from the broadest constituency because different groups like it for different reasons.
#2 is not usually broadly supported enough to be voted in and #3 doesn't solve the problem that #1 and #2 aim to.
> Surely no one expects other things like road maintenance to be financially self-sustaining?
Because nobody every voted for road maintenance to be self-sustaining. People usually are voting for tax increases that are meant to pay for roads.
Now I don't know how stuff works in the States, but what's the government's job if the municipality does this with their own funding? Aren't they free to burn their own money as they please (or, their community pleases) be it cantaloupe contests, marching bands clubs or broadband internet?
Not an American. I do believe sustainability is important. However if the market failed to provide a solution, then a wee-bit of incentive is needed. Probably in 20 years those networks will be privatized so idk why they're complaining.
Additionally, US could very well force the sharing of infrastructure to get the market working better and force the market players to only discriminate its prices by region, not just where there is competition.
TL;DR: market failed, they can't cry because they didn't do the effort.
To me that seems like a strange argument against a municipal service. Surely no one expects other things like road maintenance to be financially self-sustaining?
[1] https://www.nogovinternet.com/