Month: June 2024

Facing Cable Cord-Cutting, Cities Fight to Tax Broadband

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This guest post by BC Law Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Daniel Lyons first appeared in the AEIdeas Blog.

Broadband has been a bright spot in America’s grim inflationary landscape. While consumer prices rose 4.9 percent last year, two recent reports show that consumer broadband prices fell, both in absolute terms and cost per gigabyte. But where many see a victory, some cities sense an opportunity. Stung by declining cable franchise fees, local governments are pushing to tax broadband. This effort faces severe regulatory headwinds, but if successful could erode consumer gains and drive broadband prices higher.

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It’s a Bad Idea, Right? F– It, It’s Fine.

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This guest post by BC Law Professor Brian Quinn first appeared in the M&A Law Prof Blog.

Hi. Back again. I’ve generally taken a hiatus from blogging, but felt it important to come back and put some things on the record, as it were. If this has not been on your radar, in the past two months or so, Delaware has been on a mad rush to make some significant amendments to its corporate law. This, after having previously signaled it wasn’t going to make any amendments this year. I’ll go into each of the proposed amendments in subsequent posts and the problems I see with the process, but in this post I want to focus on one of the potential reasons for moving so quickly to make changes to the law. 

The amendment themselves are what are being called market practice amendments. Earlier this year the Chancery Court asked itself: “What happens when the seemingly irresistible force of market practice meets the traditionally immovable object of statutory law? A court must uphold the law, so the statute prevails.” Moelis. In all three of these cases, the court effectively dealt a knuckle-wrapping to practitioners.

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