The Lion Lies Down With the Lamb

THE LION LIES DOWN WITH THE LAMB
[SOURCE: Tales from the Sausage Factory, AUTHOR: Harold Feld]
[Commentary] Increasingly, incumbent telephone companies have realized that fighting municipal broadband networks is a losing issue for them and have decided to figure out how to make money out of it. I have said for awhile that corporations confronted by a serious challenge to their business model undergo their own version of the famous five stages of grief. Denial (“There's no way this can seriously challenge us!”), anger (“How dare they challenge us like this! To the regulators to squash this at once!”), bargaining (“O.K., instead of banning it, lets regulate it to create a 'level playing field'”), acceptance (“We are no longer going to lobby on this”), and profit seeking (“Hey, if we think about it for a minute, we can figure out how to make money on this!”) The pro-muni broadband provision in the otherwise pro-Telco Barton Bill and the revision of the anti-muni broadband provision in the Stevens Bill to a pro-muni broadband version indicates that Congress has no intention of squashing muni broadband at this point. But Feld offers four cautions: 1) Incumbents providing muni broadband means less chance for competition. 2) In dealing with incumbents, local governments need to take every effort to make sure they insulate themselves from this kind of “capture.” 3) Once the incumbent gets around to building its competing private system in the area, local governments will need to be alert for any sign that the incumbent is using its control of the muni network to try to shift customers to the private network. 4) Finally, it is important to recognize the difference between municipal networks of whatever flavor and non-commercial community-based networks.
http://www.wetmachine.com/totsf/item/579