George Bonser wrote:
What I think George's comment does not completely appreciate is that (ideally) cities are imposing such requirements at the behest of and for the benefit of the (local) public, whereas private constraints on local access are (by design) motivated by profit.
I wasn't really talking about franchise agreements as those are different and in many cases stipulate things like there can be no monopoly, etc.
What I was talking about was what if a city simply decided to charge an Internet provider an "access fee" to the city's people. An "eyeball fee". The city says, "hey, you are making millions selling ads that these people view and the more eyeballs you have the more money you make, so we are going to charge you for those eyeballs". Which is basically what Comcast is doing ... charging content networks for access to eyeballs. What if they themselves got charged for the same thing. Would they think that is "fair"? And what if the city had its own community high speed internet that paid no such charge?
They do already. It's called HBO, Showtime, HDNet Sports, etc. - they get charged per eyeball for those networks, and so they pass the charge on per eyeball to the customer. Nothing is new here.