[knjoy]

Totally agree here. I live in a building that only has Time Warner (ya, didn't think about the ISP before renting my apartment.....). Every week I lose internet for a day or two. Internet is a public good and should be treated as such...

[mjevans]

Making kickbacks and other freebies illegal would help, as would requiring all contracts entered into by such middle-management public records.

I recall hearing something about a former apartment complex mentioning how costly (letting an additional provider) in was for them; but I never did learn the details of _what_ was costly about that. Having said data out in the bright sunlight of public records would make planning a beneficial change to the status quo much easier.

[chrishacken]

The problem with this is you can name a “kickback” by anything else, like “rent”, and that makes it legal.

[freeopinion]

I don't think internet is a public good. But I do think there is a public interest. This is how I see it:

Communication must be transported through some medium. That could be air, copper, fiber, etc. For the sake of this discussion, let's focus on fiber.

To connect everybody with fiber, the utility has to bury fiber under property it doesn't own. (Or it could run it arial over property it doesn't own.) For the little section that runs from the street through my property to the network interface device attached to my house, I am more than happy to give the utility permission to trench and bury fiber. But they own the fiber and are responsible for its maintenance.

If there is ever any maintenance issue with that small portion buried in my yard, they don't have an easement to dig it up and service it. They need my permission. Because it is directly affecting my internet connection, I'm usually happy to grant permission. But when it runs under my driveway, I don't want them digging up my driveway. We work together to find some option that isn't too expensive, but doesn't involve the destruction of my driveway.

Let's say I want to switch providers. The new provider can't just reuse the fiber in my yard because it doesn't belong to them, nor to me. So each potential provider has to bury their own across my yard without disturbing the others.

Because this seems suboptimal to me and because I take the long view, I have my network interface device moved to the curb, and I own the fiber in my yard. But now the burden is on me to have the right kind of fiber and the right type of fiber connects and to fix any issues.

Now let's say that my neighbor's connection also runs through my yard. Neither my neighbor nor the utility want to be beholden to me for maintenance. They will want an easement that gives them the right to do whatever it takes to fix the fiber in my yard. But if my neighbor ever wants to switch providers, the new provider will need another easement.

Generally most of the property across which the fiber is installed is publicly owned. Each utility has their own easements through that property. Aside from the obvious duplication of infrastructure with its associated price inflation, there is another problem. There is only a limited space for easements. If there are multiple water utilities and multiple power utilities and multiple gas utilities and multiple telecom utilities, the easement corridor gets pretty crowded and could conceivably even be exhausted. How do you decide which private company gets a free easement and which doesn't. Should we start charging for the easements?

Also, it stands to reason that if there are 25 utility easements under main street, there is a much higher probability on any given day that one of them will dig up main street for maintenance than if there were only 5 utility easements.

So in the end, I think all private utilities should have equal access to easements on public land. You can do that by auctioning those easements every set interval. Kind of like we do with spectrum. But I'm not very satisfied with how that has worked in the past. It is impossible for any little guy to get a foot over that hurdle. The only acceptable alternative I have encountered is to deny easements to them all.

We still need transmission lines and those will still need easements on public property. One obvious solution is to have those lines be publicly owned. Just like I took ownership of that hypothetical fiber running through my yard.

In the case of fiber, you could run 144 x 144 fiber in very nearly the same space it takes one utility to run 144 fiber. So you could conceivably rent out fiber to utilities. But that doesn't work as well for water utilities. With telecom, we can mingle data on the same fiber. That doesn't work so great for water. It is probably practical to have a different solution for water or gas than for telecom. Power may require a solution of its own.

Through this line of reasoning I have come to believe that public ownership of transmission lines across public property is the best arrangement for telecom. Any provider that wants to buy up private property or buy up easements across private property is still free to do so.