Municipalities against the corporations

Ron Sege writes over at news.com about a broadband bondoggle in the making. Although coming from a corporate background Sege writes in favour of letting local municipalities compete with existing broadband service providers. He argues that recent legislation in Pennsylvania is serving against the best interests of the people by impeeding the expansion and improvement of broadband access where existing carriers are dragging their corporate heels in the interests of short term profit.

I couldn't agree more. I had an argument about this recently on my local ISPs forum. My opponent in the argument just kept saying that having government entities provide services is a) unfair competition and b) inefficient. He claimed that a government has an inherent and unfair advantage against any external competitor. Furthermore, this advantage makes government service providers lazy and inefficient and unable to promote or invest in new improvements.

I couldn't agree less with these arguments - most of these municipalities are wanting to provide services because their local providers are not innovating or even providing basic servic. The encumbant service providers are unfairly exploiting their position and frequently exploiting a monopoly advantage.

Furthermore governments are directly responsible to their citizens but customers are usually at the mercy of their providers when that provider is essentially operating a monopoly or trust. Just as people what they think about their local phone company and look at how many are ditching those phone companies to go with mobile phones where there is at least a choice of a few providers in most markets (even that is reducing).

The "digital dialtone" market desperately needs more competition and in IMHO any source is a welcome one. If corporations can't compete with local municipalities then they need to re-examine why they are in business in the first place. Perhaps they need to IMPROVE their service, offer NEW services and be MORE EFFICIENT themselves?