
“This is crazy”: FCC kills part of San Francisco’s broadband-competition law - tolien
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/this-is-crazy-fcc-kills-part-of-san-franciscos-broadband-competition-law/
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aksss
This article seems like fear-mongering/muckraking.

The voices in the article complaining about the FCC ruling are saying that
it's impractical to share in-use home wiring runs, so of course the Article 52
law shouldn't be read as requiring MTE building owners to allow such sharing.

Okay, except that DirectTV had petitioned the FCC to do exactly that in the
past - multiplex their signal over an in-use home run to a tenant unit. The
FCC said that the feedback they received at the time on DTV's proposal cast
doubt on the ability to do this cleanly, so they would not accept DTV's
proposal to require it.

In this present ruling (subject of the article), the FCC is agreeing with the
MBC petition that the City can't now require this. The City says their law
doesn't require this. The FCC responds that okay, then no problem; but if
someone were to try an interpret it this way (since we have providers on
record trying to do exactly this in other venues) just know that it would be
invalid.

So what's the problem? Why try and frame this as an oppressive FCC crushing
the benevolent City's intentions? It's a boring clarification unless someone
has interest in actually doing what the FCC is prohibiting, which the City
says it's not, so.. someone's making much ado about nothing, probably to fan
political sentiment. And Ars Technica is being a stooge or complicit.

------
javagram
> Pai accused San Francisco of playing word games, saying in today's meeting
> that "it is difficult to understand how anyone can be harmed by a decision
> to preempt a city mandate that the city itself claims doesn't exist." Pai
> said that if the city is correct that its law doesn't apply to in-use
> wiring, there's no reason for it be concerned about the preemption.

This is confusing. If SF itself claims the law doesn’t require this, why are
they concerned about the FCC saying it can’t do that?

As far as I can tell from the article, the law remains in place except for the
part SF says doesn’t exist and the FCC says it dislikes.

~~~
olliej
San Francisco passed a rule that said an apartment building can’t make the
choice about which carrier they use. But apartments often make deals with
carriers in which they get paid if they’re exclusive to one carrier.

Of course the first thing this does is reduce competition: it costs at&t,
Comcast, etc less to buy off the building owner than actual competition would.

So SF required that building owners allow residents to use which ever carrier
they want. That requires either installation of additional cables, or sharing
the building cables.

The FCC makes the claim that the only option is sharing the cables, and
sharing the cables will make companies less likely to invest, harming the
competition. It deliberately ignores that the current competition is not the
price paid by residents by the private paid to the building owners. Once the
carrier gets that contract in place their is no competition for the actual
residents.

SF points out rightly: the legislation does not require shared cables: the
carriers can choose to put in additional cables, but that’s a dumb thing to
pay for. Carriers have turned around to say essentially “having to invest in
cables means we won’t invest in cables”, and their paid enforcer has done
their bidding to block that.

~~~
aksss
Except I don't think anything in the FCC ruling invalidates the sharing of
inside wiring unless it's requiring the sharing of 'in-use' wiring.

The FCC press release states, "Agency Narrowly Pre-empts Part of a San
Francisco Ordinance...The Commission preempts part of an outlier San Francisco
ordinance to the extent it requires the sharing of in-use wiring in MTEs.
Required sharing of in-use wiring...threatens the Commission’s framework to
protect the technical integrity of cable systems for the benefit of viewers."

"to the extent that it requires sharing of in-use wiring" is the key here.
Notice they cite "technical integrity of cable systems for...viewers". This
wording is not accident - it's because DirectTV had petitioned them to require
cable companies to let them run their signal over an _in-use_ home run from a
traditional cable TV company.

Where are you reading that this agency ruling invalidates all of Article 52?
Or specifically the part that SF requires building owners to allow residents
to use a carrier of their choice?

I don't see that anywhere, but maybe I missed it.

