Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital offers a fantastic, capitalist, classically conservative essay on municipal telecom/broadband: Benchmark is an investor in Tropos, disclosed in Gurley's essay, but his essay is one that should make those that favor self-determination in government and true competition cheer. He peels back in six points the problems with the rash of laws sparked by a March 2004 Supreme Court ruling to restrict municipal involvement in telecommunications infrastructure and service.
In brief, these laws: favor incumbents by eliminating competition, enforce the idea that oligopolies are competition, restricts American innovation, restricts leverage for municipalities over incumbent development, eliminates community service aspects of broadband, and removes self-determination. I call this classically conservative because he's in favor of competition, although many conservatives would exclude municipalities from being involved as competitors.
"In what is ostensibly the cornerstone "democracy" on the planet, one would think that the citizens in each of America's cities could simply "vote" on the services they believe make sense for their city to provide."
Carol Ellison writes about the tale of two companies interested in the muni space: Ellison runs through the issues facing Tropos, a Wi-Fi metropolitan mesh provider, and DynamicCity, which offers fiber to the premises (FTTP). "The anti-muni bills present a scenario where their companies aren't submitting bids to win the business. They're forced into negotiations with a competitor, the incumbent carrier, which understandably will want to protect the market and keep its competition out."