Yesterday President Obama demonstrated that he is not irrelevant by directing the FCC to regulate broadband Internet providers as utilities to ensure “net neutrality”, allowing customers to access the sites they cared to without throttling or blocking in order to promote sites the carriers preferred.
I am a fair-minded person person and try to give differing points of view a fair hearing. Can someone explain to me the argument in favor of allowing the carriers to control traffic as they care to? Please keep in mind that every major carrier operates under exclusive franchises, became wealthy under exclusive franchises, and that the carriers didn’t invent the protocols they’re profiting from now.
Proprietary networks were tried repeatedly. They all flopped. It’s only the adoption of the public Internet that allowed the creation of the world as we and the carriers know it.
Nick Gillespie complains bitterly about the move:
Reason contributor and Clemson University economic historian Thomas W. Hazlett defines Net Neutrality as “a set of rules…regulating the business model of your local ISP.” The definition gets to the heart of the matter. There are specific interests who are doing well by the current system—Netflix, for instance—and they want to maintain the status quo. That’s understandable but the idea that the government will do a good job of regulating the Internet (whether by blanket decrees or on a case-by-case basis) is unconvincing, to say the least. The most likely outcome is that regulators will freeze in place today’s business models, thereby slowing innovation and change.
or, in other words, he’s lining up on the side of monopolists, granted their monopolies by government action, against content providers in the name of I’m not exactly sure what. I think he may be instantiating the dividing line between anarcho-capitalists and libertarians. I think he just doesn’t like government intervention, not realizing that the companies he’s defending have benefited so mightily from government intervention.
I don’t understand the issue or the policy proposal well enough but it seems to me that the argument here is that we can’t trust government to fix the imbalances that it itself helped create.
The only thing that really concerns me about this is the possibility that the president’s move may have been prompted by Comcast. That the administration is in bed with Comcast is well known and Comcast has already negotiated a deal whereby Netflix pays them for not throttling their traffic. This whole thing may be some pretext for giving Comcast an advantage over its competitors.
My preference would be to enjoin the broadband carriers from getting into the content business. For an analogy think of the movie studios owning movie theaters, as was the case for decades.
Then start changing the exclusive franchises under which the broadband carriers operate and which are inhibiting competition.
A lot of different issues get lumped under net neutrality. On the consumer side, there are total usage limits (GBs/month), and there are tiered bandwidth plans. On the supplier side, there are prefered sites. These sites get faster bandwidth or service.
This is not as simple as it seems. There are technical issues that make it a lot different than just slowing down one person’s traffic. You are getting your faster speed through channel bonding. Back in the dial-up days, you could get this to increase the speed, but it would cost more.
On the supplier side, they can route traffic through specific servers like a toll pass lane. Netflix can pay Comcast extra to ensure its customers have a stutter-free experience. Otherwise, Netflix customers will be competing for the same bandwidth as the porno and video game customers.
Content is going to overtake bandwidth, and unless the bandwidth providers continue to upgrade their equipment, they will be forced to ration the bandwidth. Government regulations cannot force them to innovate. If this were possible, the electric grid would not be falling apart.
In my area, Cox, AT&T, and Dish TV are constantly bombarding me with offers to switch. If Google could get the radio spectrum, they would probably supply free WiFi, and the cell phone providers could start providing streaming services also.
In the end, free is never free. Remember when you thought that Facebook was free? Now they own half your life.