Very cool article. As someone who's very much for small gov't, net neutrality has been a really hard issue for me, personally, as it's making another law to ensure more freedom? Those two concepts are kind of hard to fit together sometimes.
Ahh, but see, what if we also took away the laws which governed who could run a Telco?
For example, there's cases where cities have been forced to remove their free wifi networks.
The technology exists now to make (slow, but) free wifi mesh networks among citizens. If anyone can make An internet, then who cares if The internet is no longer neutral?
Laws enforced against deceit and theft and murder help freedom. Laws dictating what's legal to sell, at what price, not at all.
The FCC that would enforce "neutrality" also enforces "indecency" rules and has in the past required a minute-for-minute accounting and balance of political expression -- the "fairness doctrine". There is reason to doubt whether neutrality laws would be freedom-promoting or welfare-promoting, in the long run.
How well did "rail neutrality" work, in the long run? See:
How about laws requiring that ISPs be 100% transparent with all filtering/throttling/etc that they do with company-crippling penalties for avoidance (instead of laughable penalties that large companies will just write off as the 'cost of doing business')?
edit: Thinking more about this, ISPs would just bury this information in the EULA in obtuse legalese so that normal users would ignore it or at least have a hard time understanding it. Then they would be in the letter of the law, but not the spirit and they would still get away with stuff. Though it would help in places like taking the ISPs to court (as right now what happens on their network is essentially a blackbox and when there's a problem they can just shift the blame to someone outside of their network and there's little you can do to prove/disprove that).
> Laws enforced against deceit and theft and murder help freedom. Laws dictating what's legal to sell, at what price, not at all.
Laws are far from the only way to restrict what is sold to the public. Large corporations can leverage their market share to shut down competition in other areas. In order to maintain a healthy market place, you have to ensure that a market is not completely controlled by a few large corporations.
A simple way to do this would be to limit some of the advantages of a corporation, which is itself a state-created entity. I've no problem with government limiting the freedom of its own creation which enjoys unlimited life, limited liability, tax advantages. I do have a problem with government restricting the freedom of individuals and partnerships to contract freely in the marketplace.
I think the problem still remains; a free market does not necessarily mean it is an optimum market, and the government is not the only factor that can adversely affect a marketplace.
...you have to ensure that a market is not completely controlled by a few large corporations.
Maybe. But if so, that's an argument for antitrust enforcement, not net-neutrality type-and-price-of-service regulations.
As the example of regulatory capture in many industries should make clear, regulations often turn out giving an advantage to the few large operators who can play at Washington rulemaking games -- with large staffs of lobbyists and big donations at election time -- no matter what the regulators' initial rationale.
Isn't net-neutrality a form of antitrust law? Net neutrality is essentially a way of stopping corporations from using their influence over communication lines to unfairly affect other markets that use those communication lines.
Usually laws restrict what individuals can do, limiting thier individual freedom, to provide what will (hopefully) be a better situation for the greater good.
But companies are owned and run by individuals, so you're interfering with an individual's ability to run his company as he sees fit.
But governments are run by individuals, so saying that they aren't allowed to pass such-and-such a regulation means interfering with the individual's ability to run their government the way they see fit.
The notion of "absolute freedom" suffers a stack overflow if you actually try and think about it. Any action whatsoever, not merely government regulation, reduces the freedom of some people and increases it for others.
> The notion of "absolute freedom" suffers a stack overflow if you actually try and think about it. Any action whatsoever, not merely government regulation, reduces the freedom of some people and increases it for others.
Yep. But this isn't neccessarily about 'absolute,' it's about "minimal as possible," at least in my eyes. As I said to someone below, I prefer to fix problems after the fact, rather than before, but I feel like this will almost certainly be a problem, so why not just cut to the chase?
I believe in a democracy+capitalism gov't has to be as large as necessary and no larger. We cannot always say that gov't has to be small, it has certain duties one of which is to make sure, through legal means, that the system does not destroy itself. Once we agree that net neutrality is required for healthy capitalism, what possible ways are there to guarantee it other than a meaningful amount of regulation. It is in the same vein as regulation needed to prevent monopolies.
EDIT: Holy crap, everyone. Please refer to my two responses just below about the reason I said "Ideally." This statement is in response to "what possible ways are there to guarantee it other than a meaningful amount of regulation." So I gave one.
I will define "market" for you. A "market" is a set of human beings interacting with each other freely, voluntarily, and without coercion.
So, to say that "the market" will take care of something is equivalent to saying that a set of human beings interacting with each other freely, voluntarily, and without coercion will take care of it.
Just like how the market prevented crap like Enron? Just like how the market punishes companies that dump toxic chemicals into waterways?
I'm sorry but the idea that the market will solve every problem the world could ever dream of is a ridiculously out-of-touch-with-reality idea. Though the idea that Congress can come up with laws to solve even one problem without creating side-effects is equally naive.
The 'market' can be gamed, and there are plenty of people that make a career out of it. As long as you can bury the truth in bureaucratic nonsense and hide behind diffusion of responsibility you can get away with practically anything.
There's a reason I said "Ideally." I don't think it would work that way, hence my support of Net Neutrality. But I still like to think long and hard about restricting market forces, and so I'd almost rather wait until the market is proven unable to handle it before enacting legislation, rather than doing it pre-emptively.
Exactly what I said. In a perfect world, nobody would buy internet service from a company that's not a dumb pipe, because this [1] wouldn't be in a consumer's best interest as opposed to a competing company that's a dumb pipe. And if things worked the way they were supposed to, if the industry colluded to cause this to happen, we could either break it up, or new players would enter the market, and people would flock to them, putting pressure on the other companies to stop being restrictive.
But there's a reason for the first word of my statement.
"we could either break it up".. aka, the market not handling things at all, and government intervention being necessary.
There's a whole set of well-defined problems in which everyone following their individual interests, the "invisible hand" so to speak, lead to a clearly terrible situation -- monopolies, prisoners dilemmas (collusion), tragedy of the commons (pollution, resource extraction, public education)..
Talking about how "ideally the market would take care of those problem" is just silly, the market will categorically not care about those problems -- it's not an intelligent force, just a sum of individual actions.
I hate my health insurance company, cable company and cell phone company -- what are my options here in this supposedly free market, start my own multi billion dollar nation-spanning infrastructure?
