The muni broadband issue is about towns being allowed to offer free net connections at all. As is obvious to almost anyone, only free access is worth offering because the micropayment problem means you can't collect any worthwhile payment for the service. A town could offer throttled wifi along a main street for a hundred dollars a block - an amount too small to break up among the thousands of visitors over the next years, and this tiny expense could easily pay off in tourist dollars captured, etc.
The telcos want to retain their captive market (the townspeople and tourists) and want barriers on sharing to do so. Remember, every cookie you bake and share with friends is theft-of-potential-service from a local bakery!
As for competition, no. That's clearly wrong. Everyone agrees that the waste from multiple sets of roads would be too much and the state maintains a monopoly on roads, etc - delegating this (toll roads) but never letting go of it.
Some things are natural monopolies. While maintenance of a sewer may be contracted out you don't see many parallel competing sewer systems. It'd be a waste. Heh.
As for what we know about market economies, we know we've never seen a communism that wasn't a totalitarianism from the beginning. Basing anything on a few obviously horribly twisted examples is wrong.
And lastly, don't conflate state ownership with state regulation. You may have to pay for the EM spectrum your wireless ISP uses - because it's everyone's spectrum and you are blocking it from other use, but that doesn't mean the government necessarily has any control over it beyond collecting payment.
The telcos want to retain their captive market (the townspeople and tourists) and want barriers on sharing to do so. Remember, every cookie you bake and share with friends is theft-of-potential-service from a local bakery!
As for competition, no. That's clearly wrong. Everyone agrees that the waste from multiple sets of roads would be too much and the state maintains a monopoly on roads, etc - delegating this (toll roads) but never letting go of it.
Some things are natural monopolies. While maintenance of a sewer may be contracted out you don't see many parallel competing sewer systems. It'd be a waste. Heh.
As for what we know about market economies, we know we've never seen a communism that wasn't a totalitarianism from the beginning. Basing anything on a few obviously horribly twisted examples is wrong.
And lastly, don't conflate state ownership with state regulation. You may have to pay for the EM spectrum your wireless ISP uses - because it's everyone's spectrum and you are blocking it from other use, but that doesn't mean the government necessarily has any control over it beyond collecting payment.