I agree wholeheartedly with the position the editors of the Washington Post have articulated on “net neutrality”:
IN THE war over net neutrality, it’s clear where the country should end up. Americans should pay for the bandwidth they consume, and they should consume any legal content they want, without interference from the network operators that transport the packets of information into their homes. That’s not just the way to maintain the free flow of information and services on which the Internet thrives; it’s also the way to encourage service providers to improve their networks rather than just manage traffic on their existing wires.
[…]
For years, the FCC has attempted to use old law to regulate broadband. The best way out of this mess is to create new law. That would settle the jurisdictional question between the FCC and the FTC, and it would make net-neutrality rules legally unassailable. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) have proposed a net-neutrality bill, but it has little chance of becoming law because it strips the FCC of some useful regulatory authorities. That shouldn’t be the end of the legislative discussion.
The part of the discussion that I find astounding is that so many libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have raised the red banner in support of the service providers who for the most part achieved their positions through government-granted monopolies as opposed to the upstarts like Google, NetFlix, or Facebook who didn’t. They saw opportunities and exploited them which would seem to me to be the free marketers’ paragon. There is nothing whatever that stopped Verizon, AT&T, or Comcast from creating world-spanning search engines, streaming services, or social media nexuses other than a lack of the will to innovate. Why should they? They got where they are by government fiat and they know they can darn well stay there by government fiat.
AT&T were a long distance provider and transmission & distribution provider. The court ordered breakup created regional baby Bells and AT&T for long distance service. The baby Bells were required to allow any long distance company equal access, and the only long distance service the baby baby Bells could provide was intra network.
Their physical infrastructure was deemed a monopoly, and there was no way for any competition to physically lay in new cabling for a competing telephone system. As such, the locals Bells were required to allow other companies EQUAL access to their network.
(Telephones use a different system than the internet, and as I understand, it would be too difficult to allow multiple local service companies.)
The model for the cable companies exists. Instead of using this model, the same people who have been creating failed regulatory schemes for the past 20 years want another crack at it, and I am supposed to believe that this time they are going to get it right.
All that is needed is a Glass-Steagall type firewall between content providers and carriers. If libertarians and free-market capitalists had any sense, they would embrace this solution. Instead, they will be lead kicking and screaming into a Dodd-Frank/Obamacare type regulation nightmare.