Judge Tosses Telco Suit Over City-Owned Network 281
tsa sends along news of the city of Monticello, Minnesota, which was sued by their local telco, Bridgewater Telephone Company, because the city chose to build a fiber optics network of their own. The judge dismissed their complaint of competition by a governmental organization. Quoting: "The judge's ruling is noteworthy for two things: (1) the judge's complete dismissal of Bridgewater Telephone Company's complaint and (2) his obvious anger at the underfunding of Minnesota's state courts. Indeed, the longest footnote in the opinion is an extended jeremiad about how much work judges are under and why it took so long to decide this case."
Re:Costly Waste of Time (Score:5, Informative)
While the economy fails, we still have grammar (Score:5, Informative)
A jeremiad is by definition an "extended critique".
May the Grammar Nazis have mercy on you.
I'm surprised... (Score:5, Informative)
Usually a smart telco doesn't sue, they simply bribe the legislature [acluutah.org] into restricting their municipal competition (bottom of page).
(Basically, Comcast and Qwest bribed the Utah legislature into stopping their multi-muni competitor, UTOPIA, in Utah. The Utah ACLU's letter against such action is here: http://www.acluutah.org/utopia.htm [acluutah.org])
Re:Costly Waste of Time (Score:5, Informative)
It's called loser-pays. We have it up here in Canada, that and less lawsuits.
Re:Costly Waste of Time (Score:5, Informative)
*sigh* YOU just made me lose some mod points. But nevermind. Since 1970s, Memphis Light Gas and Water has been running power cables with FIBER inside. In other words, the entire city is full of dark fiber. How much extra did it cost to run the fiber? Not that much, just the incremental cost over what it cost to have power lines that were empty in the middle, instead of being filled with fiber.
What is to stop this city from doing the same thing? It probably already did that, and that is why it feels that it can provide fiber to the house.
Just because *YOU* don't have experience does not mean that your experience is right. People working in government agencies do not start their day thinking how they can be inefficient for you.
Re:Costly Waste of Time (Score:3, Informative)
And what if I don't like either service. Where's the 3rd company? Oh, that's right, companies aren't allowed to lay their own fiber - government restriction. You call this competition?
I wouldn't say the government can prevent usage of easements for cabling. But they sure can make it a pain in the ass for the company. However, should they prevent usage of the easements, that could be fought in court. So to use easements, you should have some cash in the bank.
Re:Missing the main point... (Score:1, Informative)
This gives other community precedence in other lawsuits across the nation.
1. The word is precedent
2. That isn't how precedent works
First, there are two types of precedent:
A) Binding precedent is... binding
B) Persuasive precedent is not binding and can be any court decision anywhere, even outside your country.
The type you're thinking of is binding.
The only cases that become national binding precedents are filed & decided in Federal Appeals Court.
State Court decisions are, at most, applicable to the circuit [uscourts.gov].
This case was decided in City Court, which means it isn't binding anywhere other than that city.
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
Re:Costly Waste of Time (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Government could have fought back (Score:3, Informative)
How's it working out for you having your government take a "hands off" approach to your banks? (assuming you are an American).
Clue yourself in. The subprime crisis was caused by government intervention, not by any "hands off" approach. Just because people can co-opt the word "deregulation" for their own purposes doesn't mean any less regulation is occurring. Check out this excellent article written 8 years ago that predicted the whole thing, down to the huge dollar amount:
The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities [city-journal.org]
Right. A single cause for a multi-trillion dollar meltdown. If only it were that [npr.org] simple [motherjones.com]. Rather than try to pin the whole thing on the CRA, perhaps you might also want to look into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act as well, which deregulated the type of insurance (credit default swaps) that banks were using to allow themselves to make the insane loans they were making. The CRA may have been misguided and caused some more risky loans to be made, but it certainly didn't, on its own, lead to lenders giving large home loans to people with no evidence at all that they could pay it back. Nor did it allow for the obfuscation of the value of these loans through the creation of these ridiculous securities, which is one of the main causes of all of the problems. Nobody knows the true value of these things. That causes panic.
By deregulating credit default swaps, the government (republicans in this case [loc.gov], and Phil Gramm specifically), allowed companies like AIG to insure these mortgage backed securities, even though they couldn't really know their true value. To make matters worse, they weren't required to disclose any of this, and they were not required to have a capital reserve to cover the insured securities either, so when home values started crashing, they couldn't cover even a fraction of the securities that they insured. The whole house of cards came down.
Banks thought they had it made, and were loaning to anything with a pulse because they figured they were covered either way, either the person pays, or they collect the insurance. AIG thought that they'd just sit back and watch the premiums roll in and that they were facing little risk. They both thought they were getting a good deal. Why they thought home prices would never fall remains a mystery.