Defying mathematics

How many times do you have to hear an old adage before you simply accept it and incorporate it into your daily life? You know, “A stitch in time …” “A bird in the hand …” The FCC obviously had incorporated the phrase “two wrongs don't make a right” when they designed less restrictive franchise requirements for IPTV providers in order to spur competition in the video market. It was a good start. A good adage properly applied.

House Democrats, however, and other detractors have done something truly amazing in taking that adage to heart. They have turned the world of mathematics on its head. Only in grammar do two negatives added together make a positive statement, albeit somewhat convoluted. In mathematics, two negative integers added together simply make a more significant negative integer. So, in order to justify their position that control should not be curbed at the local level and that franchise demands are those local governments' territorial rights, these detractors must have been thinking of multiplication. Because only here can you multiply two negatives and, lo and behold, get a positive.

And here they defy the laws of mathematics. Because multiplying negative policies across thousands of local municipalities does not a positive franchise policy make. It just makes matter worse — more negative. It corrupts, delays and raises the cost of the process. How could it not?

The job of local politicos is to hold companies hostage for whatever community ransom they can extract, especially if the company delivering a service is remote and not necessarily providing jobs for — or sometimes paying taxes in — the communities in which they're doing business. It's their civic duty — and not bad re-election strategy either.

The FCC saw this run out of control for cable companies and didn't want to make the same mistake twice, let alone 20,000 times or more across the country. One negative policy multiplied by -20,000 is still -20,000; two negative policies multiplied by -20,000 is still a -40,000 and so on.

As reported in Carol Wilson's story on page 14, AT&T and Verizon have already started responding to this negativity. Although these carriers don't say officially that they are giving preferential treatment to states that stick to the concept of a true statewide franchise — and maybe they are not — the rate of fiber deployment appears to follow that track. And like local politicians trying to get as much for their communities as they can, carriers have their shareholders to answer to. It only makes sense to deploy fiber where they can make money from it.

No doubt they will be, and are being, accused of redlining or discrimination. But local politicians should recognize that if bringing in a competitive video service reduces cable rates, then they have done their job. Why get greedy?