approval from:
PowerMatt 
catseyenu
| How to define "free market" Several posters have indicated that the problem with this op/ed author's argument is that a muni-run broadband provision is outside of the free market and represents exactly the opposite.
In the case of broadband, and other services as well, such a statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how free-market principals apply.
As long as a municipality doesn't enforce a monopoly on the service (i.e., ban the provision of services by commercial providers) then the municipal- and community-based provision of services is nothing more onerous than the decision by a customer to obtain the product by building it himself rather than by buying it from the current set of commercial vendors. And that's the crux of the matter: broadband communication, especially with the fast-paced improvement in wireless broadband capabilities, is a relatively low barrier-to-entry market. Once somebody has access, it's easy to share, and sharing doesn't generally cause a significant degeneration of one's own service. Thus, for a community or municipality to build their own broadband infrastructure, and then simply pay a bandwidth-based fee to LD carrier is just an example of the customer competing with the vendor.
And there's nothing anti-free-market about that. In fact, the possibility and freedom for customers to do that is a necessary component of a working free-market economy.
Cheers,
-Dan Engel |
