Austin officials said Google didn’t receive special treatment...
Austin officials said Google didn’t receive special treatment in bringing Google Fiber to the Texas city, as the mayor first said Tuesday after the partnership was announced (CD April 10 p10). AT&T had proposed its own gigabit network in Austin…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
but only if it got the same terms and conditions as Google, prompting such questions. “We are prohibited by law from favoring one provider over another,” said Austin Telecommunications and Regulatory Affairs Officer Rondella Hawkins during a live Gigabit Nation show Wednesday. State regulations limit what the municipality can require in terms of open access or bandwidth caps, Hawkins said. Council member Laura Morrison agreed. “What I learned is that we're under state regulations and we don’t have the authority to offer anything to one franchise that is not completely available to the other,” she said. “We did not offer incentives. … There were no accommodations that weren’t available to everyone.” They described the amount of enthusiasm building in Austin across email listservs already and the many letters of community support they had attained to help secure the Google Fiber deal, expected to connect its first Austin homes in mid-2014. The city response was “spontaneous and immediate” when Google Fiber first asked for information, Morrison said. The city presented letters of support from the Texas House, Senate, the city council, the city manager, creative leaders and from the health and education sectors of the city, among others, she said.