FCC to defend “net neutrality”
From ABC News:
The head of the USA’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed new rules requiring internet providers to respect “net neutrality”, the principle that all online traffic should be treated equally.
“The internet is an extraordinary platform for innovation, job creation, investment, and opportunity,” FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said in remarks prepared for delivery at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
I am incredibly glad that the FCC is coming out in favour of net neutrality. Nothing threatens the ongoing survival of the internet like attempts to control the flow of information whether they come from corporations or governments.
The prioritisation of one type of traffic over another is “picking winners” and derails attempts at innovation. For example, slowing file sharing traffic down may inhibit piracy but there are legitimate uses of things like BitTorrent, such as the distribution of open source software without relying on a server with a huge amount of capacity.
We could move things like online music stores to a Bit-torrent based system and reduce the download costs of that store, leading to a lower price for the end customer. Things like this can’t happen when companies have control over the speed of certain types of web traffic.
Imagine if Time Warner AOL’s ISP service reduced the speed of traffic to competitors’ music stores (Apple, for one). Net neutrality stops this anti-competitive behaviour.
With all due respect, this is utter rubbish, and I still can not for the life of me understand why a lot of people who believe in internet freedom generally, want such a strong degree of government intervention in internet as this will lead to. Ignoring for the time being that there is no evidence whatsoever that such a law is necessary – there are no plans by companies on this at all – it’s the precedent of government beginning to control the web through this that worries me.
I mean let’s be clear here: “network neutrality” as currently proposed by the FCC would provide the federal government extensive power to mandate how businesses can provide Internet service to their consumers. This is a pretty big jump in allowing government regulation of the web, that’s quite unprecedented in the US.
Considering how innovation and investment in the Internet has occurred due to an absence of government regulation and interference, imposing a mandate on network management would represent a dangerous precedent in terms of Internet regulation. Not to mention a violation of private property rights, and a good lead in to things like internet censorship (of course, in Australia we’ve bypassed this middle step and gone straight to proposing censorship).
Considering all the innovations in the internet have occurred free of government interference, to now give the government the right to meddle seems mind-boggling to me. I mean, by mandating – by law – that all parts of the internet be treated equally, you are – without doubt – stifling innovation and competition.
The internet has thrived without government intervention, prescriptions, and mandates. Personally, I’d quite like to keep it that way.
There’s a good paper on this at http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9775
As I’ve been reading various comments, I agree with some of them where they state they have some mixed feelings about this idea being both good and maybe not so good. As long as it does not interrupt too much of the ISPs. Of course, we may not know that until the basic “trial and error” take place.
The internet wouldn’t have existed without government “interference”. If you think that allowing anti-competitive behaviour and fiddling with network protocols to save yourself a few bucks is the answer to rising costs for ISPs having to deal with more traffic, you’re quite mistaken.
That Cato paper recognises the problem that the “end to end” principle is threatened but then dismisses it as not actually being a problem because it’s not like owning a sizeable chunk of infrastructure allows you to control what data is routed through it (which is incorrect).
There’s just no pleasing you libertarians is there? Any action by the state must be, by definition, bad.
Sam – perhaps the internet wouldn’t have existent without government ‘interference’ at the outset- the problem is that if it had remained in the hands of the government, we’d still be using the Internet to email our Spacewar! scores to our cousin at MIT, and that’s about it!
What I think is that if an ISP chooses to implement such protocols, then a market will exist for customers to switch if they are unhappy. If anything, the current plethora of regulations restricting competition is the problem! I don’t think this is necessarily a good solution for ISP’s (and again – please note – there is no evidence that this is what they actually want to do), I just think that the internet has survived rather well without government interference, and now is not the time to start. If some ISP’s want to experiment with such things, I don’t mind, because I can always switch. Even if all major ISP’s would filter information in such a manner, I am sure a market will exist for a newer one to crop up.
Although generally yes, we libertarians are a rather grumpy bunch, and pretty much any action by the state is bad. That’s what makes us libertarians :)