this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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It's not a precedent, it's a playbook and telecos have been following it for decades. If you have one of the big telecoms in your city, they will sue to block municipal broadband. These suits win more often than not and even when they lose the rollout is usually delayed long enough as a result that they break even on legal fees.
This is actually Cleveland's second attempt to expand municipal broadband ~~after their prior effort in 2021 was thwarted when the Ohio state government banned Cleveland and other cities from offering a public option -- obviously at the behest of lobbying from ISP special interests.~~ Correction: the broadband provision was struck from the budget bill before it was signed by the governor. It appears that the 2021 effort to build out municipal fiber failed for other unrelated reasons.
This new initiative is actually a bundle of public-private partnerships as opposed to true state-owned infrastructure:
NOTE: The original article has a typo where they misquote Davis as saying “Since the city’s paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.” This has been corrected in my quoting of the article
The metro area where I live had to do this public-private partnership for the same reason. They proposed public fiber years ago and Mediacom sued and blocked it. This was how our metro area (a collection of roughly 6 cities) got around that bullshit lawsuit. As a result, we now have 1Gb symmetrical fiber for $60/mo (Mediacom charged $120+/mo for 1Gb and maaaaybe 10Mb up on good days, oh and constantly had outages).
Fuck Mediacom and their ilk.
Fuck the courts that enable them instead of shutting these monopolies down.
Just because the city's not "putting anything in" doesn't mean they aren't contributing or absorbing costs.
The city should have a stake in it, since it's on city property, and the city maintains the local infrastructure (poles, right-of-ways, etc) that these companies need to install anything. Otherwise it's just another (local) monopoly.
Wow, I missed that they banned it in Ohio. It must only apply to new systems as I'm fairly sure Fairlawn is still operating municipal fiber.
That's really irritating though, of course they snuck it into a budget bill.
Whoops! I went back to double-check after seeing what you said and found that the provision was actually dropped from the bill in the time between when it was passed by the Senate and signed by the governor.
The way it got quietly dropped like that kept it from being well publicized, but the long and short of it is that I misremembered and then failed to spot this detail while fact-checking myself. I'm sorry for spreading misinformation -- I've updated the original post
Ah good! That simplifies things for Cleveland then.