By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is an iTunes mix of today’s birthday
boy, Frank Sinatra:
One reason First CoffeeSM, who’s covered
everything from high school girls’ basketball to A-list celebrities, municipal
water bond meetings to summits of Central Asian presidents, bodies found
floating in a rural lake to oil tankers in crisis on the high seas in his
ersatz career as a journalist, enjoys the business technology beat is that
there’s not as much hypocrisy, fluff and just plain, flat-out lying as there is
in other areas of journalism:
“Mr. City Councilman, did you know, when you bought the
worthless 40-acre parcel of land out past the dump on Ladies’ Mile Road that
within the year the commonwealth of Virginia would appropriate it for
construction of the new maximum-security prison, and pay you ten times what you
paid for it five months earlier?”
“Son, I don’t know what you’re implying, but as a proud
public servant of the people of Roadkill County, I can assure you…”
“Mr. City Councilman, isn’t it a fact that the commissioner
for state facility procurement is a golfing buddy of yours and a good friend?”
“Son, my golfing times are apolitical, I never discuss
anything of a professional nature with anyone, certainly not anything
inappropriate to the public trust the voters…”
Sometimes you want to go home, put your head in a toilet and
flush. So it’s particularly disquieting to see a virulent strain of mendacious spin worming its way into what
should be a straightforward, clear-cut, best-man-win field of technological
progress.
We speak, of course, of the
spurious, specious arguments wi-fi providers put forth against municipal
wi-fi. First CoffeeSM salutes the city of Tempe, Arizona,
which the Associated Press reports today is “due to have wireless Internet
available for all of its 160,000 residents in February.”
The AP says “consider it a municipal status symbol in the
digital age: a city blanketed by a wireless Internet network, accessible at
competitive prices throughout the town’s homes, cafes, offices and parks.”
Which is wrong, of course. “Status symbol” all wi-fi would
be if vendors have it their way, but the city of Tempe understands that municipal
wi-fi can be a great spur to local development, a leg up for those who need it
to be more productive. City officials sensibly realize that ubiquitous wi-fi
will “attract more technology and biotech companies – and the young, upwardly
mobile employees they bring,” according to the AP.
Philadelphia’s working on a citywide high-speed system with
EarthLink Inc., the town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania is covering large parts
of the city with municipal wi-fi and an ISP is building a competing system as
they should. New Orleans is building free, limited-speed system. Wayne and
Garth’s own Aurora, Illinois is talking about one.
Muni wi-fi’s a no-lose winner. So why do commercial wi-fi
providers claim it’s the worst idea since New Coke? Two words: Compe. Tition.
For all they blather about the joys and wonders of
free-market competition, and for all the untrammeled good it brings consumers,
the plain fact is every single company
selling any good or service in the world wants just one thing: A
competition-free monopoly. Every business innovation for an edge, any
exclusive offering, any competitive advantage is nothing but an attempt to
work, however briefly, competition-free: If you’re the only company to think of
adding XYZ capability to the JP-47, if your FirePhaser is the only one out
there, or if you’re the only one with good customer service, you have a
monopoly and can name your price, at least until next week when somebody copies
the idea.
A bill in Congress which would make it illegal for
municipalities to offer wi-fi, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas,
is nothing more than a sop to an
industry which hates competition as much as the next guy. Competition makes
businesses work harder, offer better prices and better products than other
companies in order to win consumer dollars, but it costs more and lowers profit
margins. Businesses hate it, consumers love it.
Opposition to municipal wi-fi can’t be seen as coming
directly from corporations who hate the competition, of course, that’s too obvious, so a report called “Not
In The Public Interest – The Myth of Municipal Wi-Fi Networks” was published
by the New
Millennium Research Council, a supposedly “independent” policy group
created by Issue Dynamics.
The connections are explained well by rabid left-wing blogger
Matt
Rubin (Hey, rabid left-wingers aren’t wrong 100% of the time, blind squirrels
and all that): “As Broadbandreports.com explains, IDI is a PR firm and
lobbying outfit specializing in Astroturf (i.e. fake grassroots) campaigns on behalf
of corporate clients.” In other words, financially interested corporations don’t want you to know
they’re creating and bankrolling the “opposition.”
A little free wi-fi here and there isn’t getting anybody’s
knickers in a twist. Chapel Hill, North Carolina is spending a couple thousand
dollars to give free wi-fi to school kids living in a housing project. Nobody’s
objecting, ISPs and other wi-fi providers don’t kick up a fuss although they
distrust the premise, they’ll let it go because they weren’t ever going to
make any money off school kids in a housing project anyway.
First CoffeeSM’s as virulently free-market as
anyone, would end all nonsense like agricultural subsidies (which is just
corporate welfare anyway) tomorrow morning, votes Libertarian in national
elections and has never met a government program he fully trusts.
Yet there are a few things government does better than
private enterprise, although the list is much shorter than most think. Building
roads is one. National defense is another. And just like new mammal species in
Borneo, municipal wi-fi is one of those rare, new finds to add to that list.
Because it’s precisely government’s inability to do most anything
well that lets private business know when to quit the field: When there’s a
rare thing government can actually productively do with the taxes it extorts, pop
the champagne and get out of the way.
Sessions’s meretricious bill is titled “Preserving
Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005 (HR 2726),” and it would bar state and local
governments “from providing any telecommunications or information service that
is ‘substantially similar’ to services provided by private companies.” As First
CoffeeSM has written, you, a slow chimp and the Barbie doll in your
daughter’s room recognize this as brute protectionism, as simply trying to
outlaw competition.
Industry water boy Sessions is a former Southwestern Bell exec
who got over $200,000 from the industry in his last election, and has gotten just
under half a million dollars over his Congressional career from them, with
SBC-associated donors alone kicking in over $74,000 during his five terms. And as
Rich Tehrani notes, he still holds half a million dollars in SBC stock
options, as well as financial interest in Verizon and Bell South, all of whom –
along with Sessions – would profit greatly from killing muni wi-fi.
Municipalities advocating public wi-fi say that the services
are needed to promote local business and build up areas the industries won’t
invest in. They’re right. Telecoms and ISPs say it’s unfair competition on the
one hand, and that they can do a better job on the other. They’re dissembling –
if they can do a better job people will pay for it. They just don’t want to
have to do a better job by the consumer, they’d rather get away with doing a
half-assed job and charging more for it.
In other areas where public and private compete – hospitals,
say – it’s been proven people who can will pay for superior private products.
What telecoms and ISPs really mean is they don’t want to have to expend the
time and effort to do a better job, and without competition they won’t because
they won’t have to.
If you’re providing a good or service and you can’t beat the
government’s quality or price you deserve to lose. If it’s true that a private company can’t build better or cheaper wi-fi systems than the government, given the inherent waste
and inefficiency that’s built into anything government does, then for
heaven’s sake that company deserves to be out of business.
If you can’t do better than government you might as well
pack it in, go work for a major metropolitan daily newspaper or get
elected to Congress, something where your nice comfortable monopoly means you
don’t have to work hard to be good.
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