Cities sue Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, claim they owe cable “franchise fees”

Centurylink has pulled quite a bit of fiber in Seattle over the last 3 years, but their expansion plans are erratic (eg: putting a 12 port GPON aerial terminal in the middle of blocks of 4 story MDUs that aren't allowed to use it) and the serviceability database often has said GPON ports misallocated due to incorrect identification of the number of units in a particular property.

I think Centurylink is hard up for cash at the moment, as they just dropped gigabit fiber with a free modem & install down to $49 a month for life in most areas. Frontier did similar offers for the 2 years prior to selling the Pacific Northwest division to Ziply Fiber.

Ultimately the City of Seattle struck a bad franchise agreement with Centurylink that didn't mandate universal fiber coverage like more sparsely populated suburbs did (eg: Lynnwood, Kenmore, etc). The effectiveness of these agreements was middling though, only the litigious cities were able to ensure the franchise agreement was enforced.

Poorer townships like Kenmore have universal fiber service available to every property by 2005 written in as a hard requirement of their franchise agreements with the telco, but without enforcement action the fiber will not be built.

Any specific suggestions for how technology can cut municipal costs?

Most of the fat in municipal spending tends to be political (pork) or criminal (public corruption and/or organized crime), rather than due to process inefficiencies that could be remedied through better use of technology.

Municipal spending tends to be dominated by the kinds of inherently labor-intensive services that can't readily be automated. Automation isn't going to have much of an impact in the number of people needed for firefighting, garbage collection, or to run and maintain urban water, sewer, electrical, and road networks anytime soon. Automation in policing is another huge civil liberties problem best left untouched.

Urban government costs money and municipal tax grab attempts like this are either evidence of greed (and/or corruption) or inadequate funding models. These are political, rather than technological, problems.

Kinda reminds me a bit of how Milwaukee wanted money from Pokémon Go because the players was playing in the local park and some even went off the path so they were arguing the app is responsible for plants and stuff being damaged. The city lost but had to pay $83,000 in attorney fees. I think it's a bit of a overreach that a city in Indiana is trying to regulate a company in California.

I know Ohio cities can have franchise fees for cable too, wonder if the regulation is city by city or all based around the same state law... If Netflix had to follow that, I guess they'd have to have a army of lawyers review each city one by one keeping a database, filing paper work, etc. 50 states, multiplied by hundred of cities. Sounds like a massive mess. Maybe if you are the only person in a town of a few thousand watching Netflix, wouldn't be worth all the extra administration work. So wonder if maybe only the big cites would get Netflix then?

Satellite has also faced the problem of being treated differently too. I know in Florida Satellite they charge a higher tax rate compared to cable but that's state wide from my understanding, since they don't have the local equipment and as many employees to maintain the infrastructure. Well both cable and satellite has installers, etc but they could very well be contractors but still putting people to work locally.

Then I know some areas try to require a permit for satellite TV and the FCC sued cities over that because of the Over-the-Air Reception Devices (“OTARD”) rule or limit the number of satellites to 1. I have Dish at home and for some reason they installed 2 satellite dishes pointing at a slight different angle than the other one. I guess some cities and HOAs think satellites are ugly too. Some still have these ordinances on the book, so surprised cities haven't removed them... Then again in some states same sex marriage is still illegal on the books too like Ohio and Tennessee, but you know they can't enforce that anymore either because of the supreme court. I guess the problem is in Ohio marriage is defined in the state constitution, so it'd take a convention to change it but I guess not a priority even though it's kinda symbolic even if no longer law. Virginia did the same, but 2020 they passed updates at least - 5 years after the ruling.

In Swedish 90s, there was a public information campaign series with vigilante kids putting a snail on the eye of people who don't pay their TV license.

I think everyone who was around then recognize the reference "Do you want a snail on your eye?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK0R-N0w8-Q

This is what's happening in Australia to the ABC right now.