Vacation work — Stevens bill cont.
After a short break for an incredibly dense and interesting IP conference (thanks, Berkeley — 84 papers in two days!), we're back to the Stevens bill.
The next section (starting on p. 184) is titled the Community Broadband Act. What it does is throw up roadblocks for communities that want to provide their own broadband services.
The section does preempt laws that prohibit cities from providing broadband of their own. But then it goes on to make it quite difficult for the public entity to do this — taking away with one hand what the bill appears to give with the other.
The city/municipality can't give itself any preferential treatment with respect to rights of way or permits of any kind (even though the city presumably controls those access points).
The city/municipality has to open up a bidding process to private companies, has to publish all the details of its plans, and has to act as if (as far as I can tell) it was merely an alternative bidder for the provision of these services. As a final warning to cities, the bill provides that no federal funds will be available to bail them out if things go wrong.
The goal of all of this is to make it tricky for cities to avoid the costs and gatekeeping associated with incumbent local telephone companies when providing broadband services. These incumbents want to make sure that cities find it very difficult to do for themselves what the local phone companies would like to do.
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